MOVIE IS MY FAVOURITE WORD

Grounding the Symbolic Realms - Peter Galison and Rebecca Belmore

2011-06-08T12:12:00.001-07:00

- from Back to the World's weekly links posting "Tea With Chris":

I love Peter Galison and his concrete ways . He wrote a book about how it was probably pretty relevant that Einstein had a crappy job at the patent office where he had to think about how to synchronize clocks for train schedules – a very big problem at that time. It's an obvious idea once you think about – the obviousness a natural sign for a real genius idea. It feels better to think that something as abstract as the theory of relativity could originate from a problem in the world so newly created as "how to coordinate train schedules". One's mundane job feels better too. This New York Times article surveys his incredibly varied works.

Speaking of grounding the symbolic realms, this reminds me of how, reportedly, Buckminster Fuller had a pretty hard timeas a child understanding that the dots on the blackboard represented points in the world - and lines drawn between them represented connections. And how he tried to change the phrase "worldwide" with the more grounded "world around" but didn't have any luck.

Which makes me think of how strangely grounded the artist Rebecca Belmore's repetitive gestures are. Sometimes, when people are trying to be more direct with their art, they occasionally think to take their work off the canvas or pedastal or loom. Sometimes the results of this freedom can, unfortunately, become even more trapped by the medium of the gallery - as it can be a challenge for irregular forms or complicated messages to keep their shape outside this context. But the artist Rebecca Belmore always succeeds to escape both the mediums, the gallery boxes and the confusion.

If you're not familiar with Rebecca Belmore's work, Daniel Baird’s article in Walrus Magazine is a good survey of her work. Even if you haven't seen Belmore's work, it is hard not to be horribly moved by even Baird’s simple descriptions of her most famous performance pieces. The works are made up of ideas and gestures and performance. They performances' power are just as undiminished through video or account (though Daniel Baird is to be credited too here). Rebecca Belmore's repetitive gestures seem to be the gestures that she knows are missing in world - gestures of grieving or acceptance or making things right or simply known. Her gestures became part of the concrete world through sheer force of will, repetition and need. Though unconventional, the work communicates directly to anyone who can look.

Oldboy (2003) – directed by Chan-wook Park, based on the Japanese manga of the same name written by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya

2011-06-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

(My friend Sean Dixon asked me if I was interested in reviewing Chan-wood Park’s celebrated movie Oldboy for his “Revenge Night” – an event involving songs, tales and plays on the theme of revenge to launch his new book “The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn”. I had been meaning to watch Oldboy for 7 years, so I said yes. I’ve been out of town, and couldn’t make it to the launch, so I recorded my review on video and sent it in. The original text is below.)

Oldboy is a celebrated Korean movie about revenge. At its heart there is imaginative violence, heartbreaking mind games, two middle-aged men, incest and high school - a live octopus is eaten, a man has only a television for company for 15 years, people lose their tongues.

The first middle-aged man we meet is Oh Dae-su. We meet him right before and right after he was anonymously snatched up and locked away in one room for 15 years. Beforehand, he just looks like a schmuck. Afterwards, he looks like a criminal.

During the 15 years, he has no contact with others. His food comes through a slot under the door. If the sheets need changing or an attempted-suicide-wound needs mending, a gas will fill the room and knock Oh Dae-su out. He always wakes up the next morning, alive in bed. He learns how to fight by watching television and pretending. He fills four notebooks with all the slights and evils he may have committed against others – in hopes to discover who would have the motive to punish him. He becomes incoherent with anger, but a poster on the wall reminds him to laugh. He does. And when he does, he looks like a scary clown.

Right before this imprisonment, we see Oh Dae-su get drunk and miss his little daughter’s birthday. 15 years later, having been released from his prison as mysteriously as he entered, we see him decide to first seek revenge and then maybe find his daughter. We can see that sure, he probably did something horrible to someone at some point in his life.

After Oh Dae-su’s release, Woo-jin, his anonymous tormentor, finally makes himself known to Oh Dae-su. He asks Oh Dae-su to discover what his motives were for punishing Oh Dae-su.

Woo-jin is a beautiful, refined man who was once capable of a great love. He seems more like a prince than a villain even though he now has a chauffer, a penthouse and an artificial heart.

It’s around this point when we learn what Oh Dae-su’s original “wrong” against Woo-jin was. The movie is not yet half way over (things will continue to get stranger) and I’m not even giving anything away to say: it is this smallness – the actual harmlessness of Oh Dae-su’s original “wrong” that is so surprising. It’s a wild and unsatisfying imbalance to all of the violence that we have already witnessed.

It made me think of “The Princess and the Pea”, another story that has a wild imbalance between complaint and origin. A princess has a restless and painful night when a single pea is placed underneath the 20 mattresses where she sleeps. In this story, we already knew about the pea. It was the outsized reaction from the princess that was so funny, even as this intolerance confirmed her true royal nature.

And true too for Woo-jin’s delicate nature, the years and years of distance between Oh Dae-su’s first “wrong” and Woo-jin’s heartache only have seemed to increased his pain and made him more beautiful – more princely – his penthouse is a palace, his clothes are immaculate, his brow is troubled just so. But he is much harder to laugh at than the princess of the pea. We have come too far with Woo-jin and have empathized too easily with his genuine heartache – while knowing that Oh Dae-su is no worthy victim of revenge.

Like wishing a terrible error away, here (after already so much violence) we wish regressively for Oh Dae-su’s first wrong to have been substantial and cruel – to have been made with horrible intentions, to be as monumental as Woo-jin’s reaction. Even if only to justify Oh Dae-su’s horrible suffering.

It is only human to make the mistake of thinking that our own pain comes from an equal and opposite force – or to assume that our own punishments are worthy. It is confusing and arbitrary when our sleeps are greatly disturbed by… not much of anything, when we discover that the source of our mountain of trouble is only a pebble.

As the movie continues with its imaginative violence and mind games between a broken prince and a lost everyman, we wish, again regressively, that Woo-jin would have chosen for his revenge, instead, all of society - an unforgiving, conservative, and sexist society, the thing more to blame for Woo-jin’s suffering than anything else. As an origin story for a villain, Woo-jin being the great and sensitive villain, it would have been epic, deeply satisfying and even logical. But in Oldboy we are suddenly and unexpectedly on a path of stubborn realism, and taking on all of society is quite a lot for just one person.

So instead of laughing or finding real justice, we descend with these characters into the confusion and meaninglessness of their war. We move further away from the spectacular inventiveness and satisfaction of a revenge genre movie and closer towards the dull familiarity of real life and its most common tragedies. The more satisfying stories we like to hear or tell ourselves are built with less human error.

In Oldboy, as real life increases, Woo-jin, having blamed just one thoughtless schmuck for all these years, starts to look a lot less like a prince and a lot more like an ordinary man with a mountain of pain and some very bad defense mechanisms. It is the arbitrary roots of suffering and the meaninglessness of violence that feels so familiar and follows us home.

Reframing Africa - curated by Jean-Marie Teno

2011-06-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

by Margaux Williamson

Last night at the Images Festival, I saw "Reframing Africa 1: Representation or Reality?".

Boy, what a relief it was to see such good work. It's rare to have all of the short works in a curated program be this full of life, this compelling - to have the story they form together be both so direct and so complicated. It was curated by the African filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno and included the work of 5 other African filmmakers.

Now that I trust Jean-Marie Teno completely, I can recommend a conversation between him and Deanna Bowen today, April 5th, at the Gladstone from 3 pm to 4 as well as his second curated program of short works that's screening tonight (April 5 from 9 pm to 11 pm) at Jackman Hall (AGO) - "Reframing Africa 2: Perspectives in Mambety's Footsteps.

Vagabond (1985) – written and directed by Agnès Varda

2011-03-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

(My friend Amy Lam asked if I wanted to go see this at the Bell Lightbox in Toronto. I had seen it before, but only once on my television. We ran into our friend Jon Davies in the theatre and sat next to him. After the movie Jon told us that this particular Vagabond screening had a no-popcorn-allowed policy. Amy and I were pretty surprised by this information though we hadn’t wanted any popcorn.)

Vagabond is about a young female drifter named Mona who lives mostly in a tent that she carries on her back, having abandoned the accepted needs, requirements and rules of polite society. Vagabond could also easily be described as a movie about filmmaker Agnès Varda’s curiosity with a young female drifter. It is one of Varda’s first movies to combine a documentary approach with fictional content – an interest that eventually drew her out of the “French New Wave Legend” category and into the “Influential Contemporary Genius” category.

The movie begins with Mona’s dead body lying in the cold landscape of a French vineyard. Varda tells us, from behind the camera, that this young woman seemed to have come from nowhere and that now she is gone without anyone coming to claim her body. Varda tells us that she wants to know what her story was – as best as it can be understood. She says she wants to gather information from the people who came across Mona in her drifting in order to find Mona’s story.

And so we start again - with the living Mona coming out of the water. The movie follows the rest of her actions and her interactions (and the testaments of those who interacted with her) until her death. It all takes place in the south of France. Some of the interview subjects offer their judgments of Mona and reveal their prejudices – others express admiration and curiosity. These reactions may not be surprising, but it is compelling that most of the admiration and curiosity comes from the women, old and young. Many of the performers are non-actors. Perhaps it is because Varda is so adapt at directing “play” that the performances from the non-actors fit in so seamlessly with the “actors" and with the loose and direct style of the whole movie. There is a real sense that everyone is “at play” at telling an incredibly serious story.

The characters include Mona’s employers for a short time, lovers for a brief moment, hitched rides that end quickly, and casual companions who are easily lost. These characters end up circling each other, too, at different times and places. It starts to look like a small world with cause and effect. We see a community being created through Mona even as she holds herself away from it. These intricately webbed interactions seem a little bit more fairy tale than realistic but we understand this fairy tale is based on evidence from the real world. Along with Varda, we are telling ourselves a story about Mona too. It is often challenging avoiding the human tendency to make stories – to make order out of random interactions. This movie does not repress the urge to connect the dots. It is the movie’s primary pleasure.

In the narrative hunt to learn who Mona is, we start to see a map of the south of France as traced by Mona – the rich people, the labourers, the small towns, the vineyard landscapes. Mona doesn’t let anyone (not even the audience) into her thoughts and feelings. We feel grateful for this, grateful for this expanse of land outside human neurosis.

We feel grateful too that Varda is more curious about Mona than pitying. Maybe it’s because Mona wants no help, represses nothing and desires little that there is a notable lack of tension around her. Her brutal honesty and lack of social discretion and generosity do her no favours - we see her get kicked out early from a ride because she insults the driver’s car, unprompted. But we also know that she wasn’t really going anywhere anyway so it made no difference that she got kicked out. Her lack of repression combined with her lack of need creates a palatable absence of social anxiety – at least for Mona and for us in the audience who may be inclined to feel sorry for her.

The original French title for this movie translates as “with no roof and no law”. Unfortunately, living without rules comes with its own joyless burden. Boredom trails Mona’s lack of social anxiety like a disease. It is boring to not need anything - to not give anything. We only see Mona’s desire ignited, and boredom lifted, on the rare occasions that she drifts by a radio and hears rock n’ roll.

Like the differing opinions of Mona help by the characters she comes across, the audiences will have a million different opinions about Vagabond. For me, it made me think that too much freedom from society can feel less like rock n’roll and a lot more like a muddy, boring entropy.

Rescue Dawn (2007) – directed by Werner Herzog, based on the life of Dieter Dengler

2011-03-22T21:07:00.000-07:00

(I saw this while in a hut on the coast of Mexico. For dinner, I had split a can of beans with my boyfriend while we looked through the movies I always bring with me when I travel. They are movies that I sort of want to watch and sort of don’t want to watch so they keep for a while. Rescue Dawn was there in a sleeve along with Old Boy, Dawn of the Dead and a Cassavettes movie. We decided on Rescue Dawn. It ended up being a great movie to watch in the tropical dark while the palm trees shook around outside, ants climbed into my drink and giant cockroaches walked by.)

Rescue Dawn is a drama based on the true story of Dieter Dengler’s crash into enemy territory during the early days of the Vietnam War. It was made by Werner Herzog who, ten years previous, made a documentary about Dieter Dengler called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The drama is pretty accurate, the documentary (one of my favourites) takes some liberties.

Rescue Dawn begins and ends within the time of Dieter Dengler’s U.S. Navy service. Little Deiter Needs to Fly is focuses on Dieter as a middle aged man who lives in California. In California, Dieter tells and reenacts the story of his life to Werner Herzog. He is handsome and thoughtful. He is not resentful of anyone he recalls and is quick to smile. He looks a touch uncertain of Werner Herzog’s process but also completely committed to it.

In the documentary, he tells us about his childhood in World War II Germany. It involved being hungry and bombings from the U.S. military. He tells us that during a raid on his village, as he stood in an upstairs window watching the chaos, that he caught the eye of a U.S. pilot who happened to be flying by the window. He said it was then that he knew he had to fly.

He immigrated to the U.S. when he was 18 and joined the navy. He eventually went to Vietnam where, on his first mission, he crashed a plane into enemy territory. This was followed by his capture, his imprisonment at a POW camp, an escape from the POW camp, a journey through the jungle and an eventual rescue by the U.S. Navy. Hunger is also a big part of this part of the story.

When Dieter tells his story, there is very little dramatization or emphasis on emotional pain, very little emphasis on the cruelty of others. It is easy to believe that there is no repressed rage or revenge fantasies for this man – only an endless depth of successful defense mechanisms and a mountain of hard-won understanding on human life. Later, in California, he shows the camera his stockpile of dry food that he keeps in giant barrels under his suburban floorboards. This is almost the most painful part of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and here he doesn’t say anything. We understand that he is both optimistic enough to survive the unimaginable but also realistic enough to survive it too.

I probably would have watched Rescue Dawn earlier had that one person at the Toronto Film Festival not told me that it was very bad and had that movie poster featured a goofily beaming Christian Bale instead of a serious Christian Bale. Also, I loved the documentary so much and had seen it several times so I wasn’t sure it was necessary to see it dramatized.

Though after watching Recue Dawn, I remembered that what is even better than a favourite movie is a good story that is worth repeating. Had I not watched Rescue Dawn, I might have missed that within one of my favourite movies was also one of the best stories that I know.

In Rescue Dawn, as we witness the actors committing themselves to their roles within the story’s parameters, it is easier to make some sort of logic out of Dieter Dengler’s ways. In one illuminating moment, after a fair amount of ill treatment at the hands of his captors, one of them blows a shot gun close to Dieter’s head – knocking out his hearing for a moment but not hurting him otherwise.

After, already, a fair amount of suffering, Dieter finally looks genuinely startled by the blast. “NEVER, NEVER do that again!” he screams, still contained in his handcuffs, surrounded by enemies. It was as though he had been in reasonable negotiations up until that point but now they had really crossed a line. His scream was a warning to not cross that unreasonable line again. Here we understand immediately how reasonable he thinks humans are, how much he is relating to them – even the ones that don’t speak his language, who drag him through the jungle in chains and point a gun at his head. It is as though he really understands that he could have been in their position as captors. But still, he is screaming, he has limits.

This is a person who had somehow managed to be on the ugly side of two ugly 20th century wars, was a victim of both and who voices no complaint. It is fair to say that with this complicated history maybe he did not so easily choose to make villains out of others.

Apart from Werner Herzog’s brilliant Little Dieter Needs to Fly, we now have more of the story of Dieter Dengler, a person whose kind, knowing and careful eyes and whose piles of food under his Californian house’s floorboards still have a lot to tell us - something about how to be insanely optimistic about other humans while staying realistic to the core.

The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) - directed by Uli Edel, written and produced by Bernd Eichinger, based on the book by Stefan Aust, based on the extr

2011-03-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

(I saw this at a cine club in Mexico City. The club is run by the director Jorge Aguilera. I had been brought in by my photographer friend Lee Towndrow. I was told beforehand that the movies for viewing were chosen “somewhat democratically”. After arriving, Jorge put out a number of movies on the floor. The one I wanted to see most was The Baader Meinhof Complex. I tried to secretly will the group to choose that one, and also tried not to. The Baader Meinhof Complex was somewhat democratically selected. In the end, the two and a half hour movie wasn’t such a big hit.

It was a strange time to watch a movie about a Western terrorist group while the Middle East was on fire with predominately peaceful protests against oppressive governments; protests ignited by the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit seller who set himself on fire after police confiscated his cart.

The next night, a few of us ended up gathering again and we watched Jacques Tati’s beautiful Play Time. A good movie to see when you are in someone else’s big city.)

The Baader Meinhof Complex tells the story of the leftist terrorist group The Red Army Faction that was formed in Germany in 1970. The group consisted mostly of young activists but also by a well-known journalist. They were known to the public at the Baader-Meinhof Group.

The movie is so careful to include all of the details of their history that there is not so much room for the stuff in between ... like tension. Maybe a faithfulness to the details was somewhat necessary with this highly contentious history, but it probably would have functioned better in serial form on television.

The movie is good propaganda against glamour and violence. The physical exhaustion of watching so much in an endless stream really does work to create an aversion ... um, for those who don’t already have an aversion.

The particulars of the group stayed with me. Visually, the anarchy and cool of the German men and women stood out hilariously at a Jordan Fatah training camp as they proclaimed their shared fight with their Palestinian comrades.

At the camp, their volatility stood out too. They conspire against one of their own - telling the Palestinian camp leaders that this newly ostracized member is an Israeli spy. The camp leaders, seeing through the in-fighting, compassionately offer the “Israeli spy” help getting home. The Palestinian camp leaders seemed centuries older.

But the strongest particular with the Baader Meinhof Group is that they are all part of the generation of young Germans born right around or just after Hitler’s reign. They are one generation removed and the inheritors of Germany’s horrific legacy. I would guess that what some of these people had was a complex view of civilian responsibility.

A lot of us think that we wouldn’t have been complacent as Germans in Hitler’s Germany but what these people might know better than us is how abstract these problems can look like at the time and how painfully clear it all is in hindsight.

They might have been acutely aware of how ambiguous that space is in-between tolerance and complacency - especially in the present when the facts and understanding haven’t yet settled. This might be where they were coming from, in 1970, when it was becoming somewhat clear that pretty horrible things were going on in the world.

Maybe with some more distance and time, another attempt can be made to tell a story about this very old and universal problem of civilian responsibility and civilian power.

Nowhere Boy (2009) – directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, written by Matt Greenhalgh, based on biography by Julia Baird

2011-02-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

(I wasn't too interested in this movie, about the childhood of John Lennon, till my friend Sheila mentioned that the director was Sam Taylor-Wood. Sam Taylor-Wood is a British artist. I was curious to see what kind of movie she would have directed and happy that I would be able to see a complete work. She often works in multi-channel video installations and I have only ever seen stills.

Sheila and I discussed in great detail when and where we would watch Nowhere Boy. Finally, on a very specific and snowy night, I walked over to her house. Inside, it became clear that we had missed the “how” part - neither of us had Nowhere Boy on our persons or in our electronic devices.

So we played Tetris instead, and drank some tall glasses of water. We wondered if this was what it was going to be like when we were old. )

Black Swan (2010) - conceived and directed by Darren Aronofsky, written by Mark Heyman, starring Natalie Portman

2011-02-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

(I saw this movie with my friend Ryan Kamstra. I wasn’t sure if I would like the movie, but I thought I might like it better if I saw it with Ryan. We have a pretty easy time laughing at things while also taking them very seriously. This is usually helpful with work that takes no breaks for jokes. We saw it at a big multiplex during the day.)

Swan Lake is an old story. Tchaikovsky brought it into form for the ballet in 1876. It tells the story of a princess who is under the spell of an evil sorcerer. By day, she is a swan, and at night, a woman. Other women are under the same spell but the princess is called the Swan Queen. They are confined all together in the prison of Swan Lake. The only thing that can break the spell is the promise of true love from a prince.

We have enjoyed this story for so long because the story both helps to clarify and to mythologize the medium that delivers it – ballet. During the day, the ballerinas are on their toes, defying gravity and human limitations to move in freakishly hypnotic and otherworldly unison. We sense there is something wrong but we also so enchanted. Afterwards, if we happen to be at the same party with the dancers, we watch them smoke cigarettes, drink vodka and occasionally glare in our direction. Mere mortals! But mortals are the only things we ever fall in love with.

In the movie Black Swan, the story of Swan Lake is updated for both the 21st century and the medium of film. This changes a few things. Here the story extends beyond the stage and into the lives of the people creating the staged performance of the Swan Lake ballet. This solves a perpetual problem with the old story: We never really knew why a sorcerer would turn a princess into a swan - other than “because he was so evil” and that is never such a good answer.

Now, freed from the narrow perspective of the stage and the fairytale, we understand more easily that a sorcerer would turn a princess into a swan because it is really something to watch a woman dance like that.

In the old story, a prince does come. He even comes close to breaking the spell for the Swan Queen, but his efforts are thwarted by the sorcerer’s trickery. The sorcerer presents his daughter to the prince as though she is the Swan Queen. The daughter, although dressed in black, is a look-alike of the Swan Queen. The prince is fooled and offers his everlasting love to this wrong woman - this black swan.

When learning of his mistake, he runs to the Swan Queen begging for her forgiveness. Being young and full of goodness, she easily forgives him, but that is not enough to end the spell. The ballet ends with a suicide or sometimes with a double suicide – since now this is the only remaining option.

But here, in the 21st century, we are not so interested in the prince. The prince, whose only purpose is to break the spell of being such a strange creature, is of no use to us. If the spell broke, the Swan Queen would lose her day job. So, in Black Swan, the prince is barely more than a prop. Though we see some elements of his character fused with that of the sorcerer (the company's artistic director) - the man in charge of the swans and picking the right woman for the role of the Swan Queen. What the Swan Queen wants more than anything is to be all swan. The Swan Queen here is Nina played by Natalie Portman.

Though the prince has lost sexual value, the sorcerer (the director) and the black swan (a new dancer at the company named Lily) have gained it considerably. The director is the boss that Nina wants to please and learn from. And Lily, with her playfully devious and sensual nature, inevitably interests Nina. Lily has so much to show her. These objects of attraction we can understand. They can only help improve her craft, bringing her closer to staying a Swan Queen forever.

Since the origins of the Swan Lake ballet, the Swan Queen and the black swan are often played by the same dancer. Nina's attempt to embody the black swan successfully (having mastered the Swan Queen already) forms the narrative of Black Swan. If she fails to embody the darker, more sensual depths of the black swan, Lily might be cast in her place.

In an earlier movie of Darren Aronofsky’s, Requiem for a Dream, his manner of exploring the murky and painful depths of drug addiction in Hubert Selby Jr.'s book of the same name, seemed a little generic or unfocused – as though the formula for serious art was obvious: the darker the art, the better the art.

But in Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s intentions seem much more articulated and transparent. It seems as though he has set himself up in this underworld, roaming around in the clichés and sludge, because that is the place he loves the best. His pleasure and a very subtle humour accompany everything - though there are no jokes. It helps here that the characters are not victims of drugs, but of excellence. The goal for excellence frames the masochism involved, in this decent into the underworld, as a rare pleasure rather than a necessary cost of pleasure.

One of the best things about the movie is the complete naivety that surrounds Nina as she bravely and blindly attempts to descend to the depths. Because of her inexperience in these depths, she gives everything she finds there the same value: sex is equal to murder is equal to confidence. This makes her quite a villain.

Throughout the movie, Nina longs to earn the ballet director’s nickname “little princess” that he bestows on only the rarest and finest of Swan Queens. It is really something to see how bloody things get before this small woman finally earns her nickname.

Get Him to the Greek (2010) - written, produced, and directed by Nicholas Stoller, starring Russell Brand

2011-02-09T06:13:00.000-08:00

(I watched this one night on my TV when I couldn’t sleep. When it was over, I watched the good parts again. Before I saw it, I mainly knew that the movie had something to do with drugs and with Russell Brand and Jason Segel - which all sounded like a pretty good idea. It also seems promising when a Judd-Apatow-produced movie involves at least one “handsome” man or at least one “unattractive” woman. It is not the male handsomeness or the female ugliness that I crave, but the lack of sexual desperation that slightly alters the typical equation for women in these movies. I am not suggesting that Jason Segel is the “unattractive” woman in this scenario - especially since he is not in the movie but had some small part in its creation.)

This movie has a really good drug climax. A good drug climax is funnier and more complicated than a car chase climax - though it is less mobile. It's the people’s brains that are speeding ahead while their bodies lag behind with all the wrong gestures. Sometimes the struggle is in becoming (or pretending to be) comfortable or sane. When comfort and sanity are wildly out of reach, the struggle to have them or to emulate them is an understandable goal, but it is always a disastrous one. We watch the characters grasping for the best (and least humiliating) understanding of what is actually happening in a specific situation. There is often much stating aloud of obvious facts or important questions - a crucial act of basic communication between friends during perceptual confusion and emotional vulnerability.

In Get Him to the Greek these communications come out like - “Why is Moby whipping us?!”, and - “Let’s go jogging.. Please! For our friendship”.

Though this great climax is brief and glorious, “Get Him to the Greek” is a three day journey. It begins with a music company employee Aaron Green (played by Jonah Hill) going to England to retrieve Aldous Snow, a rock star (played by Russell Brand) who is in a slump. Green is to bring Snow back to Los Angeles so he can perform at a concert. The concert will mark the 10 year anniversary of Snow’s most celebrated rock concert that took place during his career peak. The CEO of the company Green works for is Sergio Roma (played by Sean Combs whose role in the drug climax was a drug movie triumph).

Snow is the kind of artist who doesn’t sleep, is capable of a complicated intelligence, engages in kindly care-taking after drugs have been ingested, and, as much as he gets himself and his art right, also occasionally gets it wrong.

The art he gets most wrong is a song and accompanying music video called “African Child”. We are shown the music video right in the beginning of the movie. The video involves Snow as a pale Christ figure dancing in an African village. The real life fears of art-making are taken here to their pleasurable extremes. Not only does the music video fail to save Africa, it fails to even entertain the masses, and it is described again and again by the media throughout the movie as one of the worst things to ever have happened to the continent.

After this flop, discomfort ensues, the love of his life Jackie Q, who is also a rock star (played by Rose Byrne), splits, and Snow awakens a 7-year-sleeping-beast-of-a-drug problem. Green finds Snow in an apartment above the River Thames living with his mother and an assistant. Everyone is immediately irritated by Green, but things ease up a bit.

The movie’s narrative suggests Snow’s great abuse of Green on the journey. And though there are plenty of obvious sadistic aspects to Snow’s typically annoying rock star character, it is very difficult not to empathize with Russell Brand and his face. He seems to not have a line of self-pity in there. The less obvious sadistic traits of Snow’s character are surprisingly nuanced. They mostly come with Snow’s selective use of the word “selfish” – as in: “Don’t go to sleep now, it’d be selfish”, or the alternative “Let me go to sleep now, don’t be so selfish”.

The absurdity of the grand drug climax works best if we have also been in touch with reality. We see it most clearly somewhere in the middle of the movie, in a brief scene where Snow calls his ex girlfriend, Jackie Q, early in the morning. In the shot, we see Green (the man there to guide and guard Snow against himself) passed out on the couch - slayed from a night of debauchery and perceptual confusion. Snow, not sleeping, is without a conscious keeper. “Are you alone?” Jackie Q asks Snow. “No” he answers, “I’m with some affable nitwit”.

The scene is still quite silly, but it is also quiet and carries with it a slightly unpleasant consciousness and a deep longing for human connection. Here in this very small and undramatic moment, we all, all of us together, understand the very same stupid, painful, obvious, unavoidable thing.

The Kids Are All Right (2010) – directed by Lisa Cholodenko, written by Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg

2011-01-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

(I saw this in the middle of a very long train trip headed north. My boyfriend picked it out. We watched it on his laptop with separate headphones. The little boy next to us was watching Spider Man without headphones. I didn’t realize till just before we started watching it that the director was Lisa Cholodenko. I had seen two of her other movies High Art and Laurel Canyon and never would have guessed this was hers. We both laughed a lot. The movie was what you hope a Hollywood/ independent/ intelligent drama could be, but rarely is - incredibly good and not dumb. )

The Kids Are All Right is about a sort-of-happy family with two moms, one teenage son and one teenage daughter. The son becomes curious about his and his sister’s sperm donor (each of the moms gave birth but the same donor was used in both cases). Together, the kids contact the sperm donor. This is done secretly so that they don’t hurt their moms’ feelings. The Sperm donor (Paul played by Mark Ruffalo) is handsome and charming and is a soft-spoken ladies’ man. He owns a fancy restaurant, rides a motorcycle and dates young earthy women with tank tops. The kids aren’t sure if they like him or not but he starts coming to family dinner.

His presence slightly alters the dynamic of the family, in some ways really positively, empowering some family members, but also threatens the position for the more controlling mom (Nic played by Annette Bening). The more laid-back mom (Jules played by Julianne Moore) abruptly kisses Paul one day after he hires her to do some landscaping in his backyard. He kisses her back. As the days go on, there is much sex, and much understated bemusement and also troubled bemusement. After one sex incident Jules exclaims - “What is WRONG with me?!?”

It is more mundane subject matter than the mysteries-of-making-art and woman-rock-stars of Lisa Cholodenko’s other movies, High Art and Laurel Canyon (where there is much seductive yearning for things just-out-of-reach - like sex & mentoring from complicated women, or professional success in the arts), but all three movies are pretty straightforward narratives.

What makes The Kids Are All Right weirder and weightier is that it has something unusual to say. The movie builds and communicates the idea that marriage is a strong institution – like a pyramid.

After the affair is revealed to the whole family in a tumultuous instant, Paul and Jules have a private conversation on their cell phones. They are both outside because they live in California. He takes a breath and then takes a big leap (maybe the biggest of his life) - “Let’s do this. Let’s make a go of this.. now that it’s out in the open”.

Jules’ face moves in a spasm between incredulity and exasperation. I don’t remember what she said first - “I’m married!!!” or – “I’m a lesbian!!!”, but she hung up the phone after one of them. He had had no idea what he was up against. Neither did we really. We are used to marriages in movies being more like straw houses, and the people who blow them down - more like wolves.

With Jules’ declarations to Paul of commitments and sexual orientation (and everything that came before them in the movie), marriage suddenly looked like a heavy, intricate object – a thing complicated and structurally sound, with an agreed upon contract that allows construction and maintenance to take place over good and bad times, something difficult but that can ideally change shape, something that can’t be so easily be knocked down.

Paul got locked out of the house and it was hard not to feel for him – especially here in this movie where all the characters were complicated. The people inside the house were miserable, but they were warm and they would recover.

Exit Through the Gift Shop - movie by Banksy, a movie by Banksy, starring Thierry Guetta

2011-01-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

(I rented this movie recently and didn’t watch it. Then I saw it lying on my friend Carl Wilson’s coffee table and asked to take it home. I managed to not watch it again but did pay some more overdue movie money. More recently, I ended up watching it one night as it came through my television from the internet while I sat on my bed with three friends. We all liked it more than we thought we would. I think. )

We start out in Exit through the Gift Shop with a lot of amateurish, rough and beautiful video footage. It has supposedly been shot by the star of the movie, a mustachioed and side-burned Frenchman living in California. The Frenchman is named Thierry. He is obsessed first with videotaping everything in his daily life and then with taping famous street artists at work. His obsession does not come with discipline but the years of it has lead to a hoard of unwatched videotapes, the casual neglect of his wife and children, and an introduction to the elusive British artist Banksy. Banksy is an artist who works anonymously and has an unconfirmed identity. In the movie we meet him but do not see his face.

Banksy (the more disciplined and purposeful obsessive) encourages Thierry to make a movie out of the videotapes. Thierry comes up with an old-fashioned avant-garde mess. After Banksy see the video, he encourages Thierry to leave the tapes with him and let him see what he could do with them. He encourages Thierry to take a break and maybe have an art show. As Thierry initiates a giant art show of his creation under the name Mr. Brainwash, Banksy makes Exit through the Gift Shop.

Exit through the Gift Shop is presented as a documentary. We see bits of Thierry’s sweet private life as shot by him. We are told stories about the narrative by Thierry and Banksy and also by the American street artist Shepard Fairey. We watch the pretty remarkable collected footage of street artists in action. When Banksy takes over the movie, we watch Thierry try to be an artist, to put his tag over other artists work, to put on his art show. We watch the public line up and buy his work.

I have read one movie critic who saw Exit through the Gift Shop as a straight up documentary and another, as a complete hoax. My default viewing position for most movies involves being comfortable being “a sucker” who is often mesmerized by story and flashing lights, as well as taking pleasure in my subjective position that often has no access (or admittedly, curiosity) about the “authentic” origin or intention of the work that I’m watching.

What helps even more in the case of Exit through the Gift Shop is that in all conceivable possibilities for how this movie was made, it is pretty easy to see that someone with a talented and thoughtful hand was making the most of their resources.

Imagine if the movie began with a room full of videotapes with the creator explaining that they had gathered hundreds of hours of footage of street art, shot by a mess of street-artist and their friends, and was now going to try to make something that the world should see.

Sometimes a lie wastes our time less and gives us more. Even if the movie is 100 percent true, Banksy’s nudging of Thierry to create an art show and leave him with the footage is a construction. A way of making art in the world from real things in the world. Pretty similar to what Banksy got himself famous for.

In Exit through the Gift Shop, we see a room full of videotapes, shot by one man, a man obsessed but, unfortunately, also overwhelmed. Here we demand order or crave it. Please, we think, make some sense of this man’s obsession. Free the disciplined artists caught by this fool.

I should mention that this fool has true gifts. In one scene as he sits in a backyard, looking at the camera and grasping for words to explain the feelings he had when he met Banksy for the first time – the performance is beautiful. Whether he is an actual street-art obsessive fan, or an amiable friend improvising, or France’s great actor – he nailed it.

The movie is accessible, clear, humorous, thought-provoking and entertaining. Or, to say it another way as one critic did, nothing new! But that is the wonderful thing about some great art – especially great street art. Communicating pain, politics and playfulness with clarity, lightness and charm should never be discounted as old-hat. It is always the hardest trick.

Somewhere (2010) - written and directed by Sophia Coppola

2011-01-12T10:15:00.001-08:00

I saw Somewhere with my friend Sheila Heti in Los Angeles. I was curious about what she had to say about the movie and asked her if she could write about it on Back to the World.

Art things I thought about this year, that I can remember today, in order of remembrance.

2011-01-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

1. The best movie I saw that I didn't write about this year - Rocky

I had never seen any of the Rocky movies. It was recommended to me after a conversation about sports movies with my friend Lucas Rebick. I was surprised at how unfake the aesthetic was. It looked like Philedelphia in 1976.. and kind of like Toronto in 2010. I was surprised at how much I related to it. I related to Rocky and to all of the women he talks to.

"Hey Rocky" the loan shark's driver hollers out of a car window. "Yeah?" Rocky asks. The loan shark's driver - "You should take your girl to the zoo. I hear retarded people like the zoo." Rocky flinches, "Fuck you, man!" Rocky shouts back, "She ain't retarded, she's just shy."

2. The other best movie I saw this year and didn't write about - My Man Godfrey

My friend Gracie has a favourite romantic comedy from every decade. My Man Godfrey is her tops for the 30's (1936). Carole Lombard plays a rich socialite who falls in love with her butler. It was pretty interesting to see how rich people were portrayed as such silly and thoughtlessly cruel individuals (as in every situation, the beautiful, charming ones escape total condemnation). Rich people have enjoyed a much better and enduring reputation since all the communists were kicked out of Hollywood. It reminded me of how quickly things can change and how very long they can stay the same.

My favourite part came when the family needed to talk about money - the matriarch of the rich family looked horrified and cried “Money is dreadful! We can’t talk about money, it upsets Carlo!” (Carlo is the artist that they support). At this point Carlo turns away, towards the fire, upset and shuddering like an angel. Luckily, the cheese sandwiches come in just as things are about to get awk-ward.

3. Thick of It

I really couldn't get enough of this British TV show from 2005 about the inner workings of the modern British Government. Sample text (if I am remembering correctly) - "Terry, do you know why they call him the Fucker?"

"Is it .. is it.. because he's.. a bit of a fucker?"

4. Work of Art: America's Next Great Artist and what people wrote about it.

This new reality TV show premiered in the summer. Contestants, from across the U.S., compete in an art competition with a jury of professional critics and artists. It was just like any other reality TV show. It was strange. And people wrote about it.

Art Fag City covered it like white on rice, Lynn Crosbie had some good points for the artists and Jerry Saltz (an art critic who was a judge on the show) wrote an article for each episode after first participating in and then watching the episodes. Jerry Saltz's articles were, hands down, the best art to come out of the show. The articles were written to an audience that included the show’s participants, viewers and art-insiders. He wrote about the art, judging the art and judging himself judging the art. It was strange and good.

Some art-insider critiques of the show sounded an awful lot like a reversal of the old art-outsider stereotype - “my kid could paint that”. The equivalent turns out to be - “my friend down the street from me, in Brooklyn, could paint that a lot better”. Sucks to be on the outside.

Though there didn’t feel like there was too much at stake (America’s next great artist-wise), the beginning of some hilariously awkward public conversations (involving critics, artists and audience) about what art is felt stupid-smart, meaningful and full of potential.

The only “unreality” part was at the end when there were only three contestants left. One would get the bank and the others nothing. Maybe it’s just my world, but every artist I know would have been more than happy to split a hundred thousand dollars 3 ways and then gone about their business. But I guess reality TV without winners or losers is just the NFB.

5. Websites about videos

I know about these two websites, Ryeberg Curated Video and 2 Pause: Freezing Music Video Culture, because I contributed to them. But they're both really interesting and I'm sure there's a lot more of these websites out there - websites that are figuring out how to talk about or organize the massive amounts of videos out there. Ryeberg has contributors write short essays on Youtube videos and 2 Pause collects interesting music videos and puts them into categories like these: Lo/No Budget (that is where I am and this nice one from Antony and Boy George), Netherclips, Stop Motion, Electric Cinema (I didn't watch them all but found this nice one from Foals and Chris Sweeney) and French Wave. I would like to see the categories that everyone has for their videos.

6. Artists Using and Sharing

I really liked that Erykah Badu made this video by borrowing the idea from Matt and Kim. She credits them in the beginning of the video. The structure of her video is identical, but the feel and meaning are completely different and more to my interests. The borrowing and added art reminds me of this article about Jeff Wall from a while ago.

Olaf Breuning's work (consisting of performance based art video) has always looked really interesting but I assumed that he, like a lot of artists, didn't put all of his work on-line. I only just saw one of his videos recently when Jon Davies screened it at the Cinecycle. It was great. Then I went home, looked him up and discovered that all of his videos are available on his website. Thank you Jon Davies for reminding me of Olaf Breuning and thank you Olaf Breuning for sharing. SO much better that way.

7. Moral/ art lessons from popular music videos

LCD Soundsystem and Spike Jonze reminds us that drunk people, whom are often beautiful and fun, can also be really fucking annoying. The video, featuring the band being abused by people dressed as pandas, is as good as Spike Jonze's videos always are. And Lady Gaga and Beyoncé remind you again that it's a bad idea to disrespect the people who serve your food. And Kanye West, who likes a lot of the same things I like ( naked ladies, revolution, ballet, Beyoncé, Takashi Murakami) reminds us to take paintings seriously.

8. Luc Tuyman's painting Turtle

I really loved this painting this year, from 2007.

I also really love this painting from Brad Phillips.

9. A brief LIFE OF A CRAPHEAD performance I saw at Double Double Land

The performances from Toronto’s LIFE OF A CRAPHEAD (Amy C. Lam and Jon McCurley) feel so good on your brain. They go right to the part that understands but doesn't share with the other parts of your brain – the parts that could explain what is happening. But then those parts start understanding something else and then, somehow, every part of your brain is being massaged by a fire in-the-know and then it is over. It can feel like good drugs, but really, it's more like spinach.

10. SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, wrote this strange book comprised of brief scenarios of the afterlife. More about life than after.

11. Missing Objects

Is it too late for a really, really long Arrested Developement movie?

Also, I would like an audio book of Jack Hitt's articles. I would buy two. While we wait, we can read his Mighty White of You: Racial preferences color America's oldest skulls and bones and listen to his Act 5, the 52 minute long audio documentary about a group of prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center who are rehearsing and staging a production of Hamlet. It's great.

12. Golden Gate Park in San Francisco

Nice work William Hammond Hall and John McLaren.

The Ring (2002) – directed by Gore Verbinski, based on the the movie by Hideo Nakata, the novel by Kôji Suzuki & the Japanese ghost story Banchō Saray

2010-12-07T16:03:00.001-08:00

(My friend Duane Wall likes horror movies but none of his friends do. So every year on his birthday, he selects a horror movie and then invites his friends over to watch the movie. Last year was Bruce MacDonald’s Pontypool and the year before was David Cronenberg’s The Fly. This year it was the American version of The Ring. The movie’s title was kept secret until it started, when five minutes in someone shouted, What is this called!?)

The Ring is a horror mystery about an unmarked videotape that somehow kills the people who watch it. The short video work features black and white footage of disturbing and seemingly unrelated scenes. One of the characters, before being properly impressed by the power of the video, expressed his opinion that it just looked like a bad student art video. (His respect deepens quickly enough). After a person watches the video, they receive a mysterious phone call and then die seven days later with a look of horror on their faces. That is, until an investigative journalist (played by Naomi Watts) starts poking around.

The movie also stars a self-sufficient child, a man afraid of monogamy and fatherhood, horses, a cluster of worn and futuristic apartment buildings and a good old-fashioned romantic/creepy island.

The atmosphere of the movie was seductive and its themes pleasurable: “don’t eat that apple!” verses “knowledge will set you free!”, peace-making verses resourceful military strategizing, the goodness of a small community island versus an impenetrable microcosm that is intolerant of foreigners and misfortune, metaphors of scapegoats and viruses becoming interchangeable.

There are lots of fun things to say about the movie but they all involve the ending. I never mind hearing the full details of a plot before I see something, but for the kind of movie whose primary success is derived from its surprises – maybe it is best to not give away its secrets.

Later on, after watching the movie, my mind wandered to the plot points and tried to connect the ways certain elements fit together. When I could fit them together with logic, I would feel a spooky pleasure. When I couldn’t, and the only end point was “supernatural mystery,” I felt as disappointed as a kid being told that babies come from heaven. We all know the real answers can be a lot crazier than the made-up ones.

It made me think of an article I had read awhile ago about David Cronenberg. He talked about being sent scripts from Hollywood that involved the supernatural and how insulting or disappointing that was since he, as an atheist, was philosophically opposed to those views. He assumed that anyone who watched his movies could see that.

I loved the image that comes to mind with this scenerio - confused studio executives trying to understand both the moral integrity of David Cronenberg and the difference between The Fly and the script for the demon/god vehicle Constantine while Cronenberg looks on patiently disappointed by what to him was obvious - his horror movies are entirely of this world.

Postscript: I also enjoyed the movie Constantine.

The September Issue (2009) - starring Anna Wintour, directed by R.J. Cutler

2010-11-24T09:51:00.000-08:00

(This always looked pretty compelling on the video store shelf but was always out when I would think to pick it up. The day it was in, it looked a little less compelling. I remembered, once I had it in my hand, that I had not had such luck with movies about fashion. But it still looked compelling enough.)

The September Issue is a documentary about the all-powerful and greatly feared editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour. Anna Wintour is credited with creating a “fashion bible” through Vogue, jump-starting the careers of young designers, centralizing the power of the fashion industry in a circle around her, striking fear into the hearts of subordinates, reigniting the fur industry, and ending grunge.

The movie covers the creation, which Anna Wintour oversees, of the 2007 September issue of Vogue – the bible part. Here, Anna Wintour is a woman who loathes small talk, is self-aware of the relation fashion has to the rest of the world, works incredibly hard, tries to not get mad when others don’t work as hard, uses words more than facial expressions to communicate, is incapable of following her grown child’s every move without adoring and irrepressible love in her eyes, reacts to things she dislikes with silence and reacts to things she likes with genuine praise. She is not primarily negative and she is not a trash-talker.

When I was watching this, I couldn’t remember if this is what our culture thinks a bitch is or if this is a very generous portrait of a woman and an industry.

Sure, you feel for the people who quiver in her uncomforting presence, but you also hope for a bit more integrity of character. If fashion really is an intersection between art and commerce, we think mostly of the commerce part in these moments. We also see that Anna Wintour does believe (or hopes) that fashion is meaningful and that art is involved. Her relief is obvious when people around her seem more preoccupied with the art than with winning her favour for obvious and easy reward. Her relief is most notable here in relation to Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director. The working relationship between these two women forms the poetic spine of the movie.

Anna Wintour’s immensity of character was the subject of another movie - fictionalized in The Devil Wears Prada, a movie based on a book of the same name that was written by one of her former assistants.

For The September Issue, the man allowed in to document the real Anna Wintour is named R.J. Cutler. R.J. Cutler’s production company is called “Actual Reality Pictures” (quite a tall claim in these early 21st century times, but anyway). Based on the production company’s name, and the other projects listed on their website, it appears as though R.J. Cutler is a man who thinks that reality TV is not real and that he is the man who will make it real. Though this just means his is a old-school documentary filmmaker whose weakness will be in forgetting his own subjectivity and impact on his subject (or his subject’s impact on him).

All in all, not a bad fit for a real person who was referred to fictionally as “The Devil” right there in the title of a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep. How much worse could it be in an old-school documentary? Not worse, though also not great. And clearly Anna Wintour is a subject worthy of something monumental.

If I was Anna Wintour, I too might have invited R.J. Cutler of “Actual Reality Pictures” to take my picture after I was fictionalized as “The Devil”. Had “The Devil” not happened, maybe someone from the production company “Not So Much Actual Reality But Still Kind Of Reality and Killer for Deeper Truth About Humans” would have gained access and made a complicated mountain out of this mountain of a subject. There is still time.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2010-11-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

(I didn’t know too much about “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” but I liked the title and I had half-noticed that the word “art” kept being used in relation to it. Somehow the “art” was not mentioned in either a flattering or negative way, just a descriptive way. “Art” can mean a lot of things, like that the characters will have a lot of feelings or that it will be either pretty unpleasant or extremely pleasant to watch or that the movie will be going after something difficult to catch. Very quickly into “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”, it was clear that the “art” in this case related to the words “intuitive” and “unusual” - and also maybe “going after something difficult to catch.”)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is made up of separate stories that happen in various times and places. They are connected literally and/or metaphorically by the title Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Servants carry a princess through the jungle. It looks pretty unpleasant to carry a princess through the jungle. But also, it looks maybe a little bit erotic. The princess has a face darkened with a scar or birthmark. The party comes to rest at the base of waterfall. There, the princess tries to convince herself that intimacy with one of her servants is love. It doesn’t work. She sends the servant away and collapses alone by the water’s edge. She cries and voices out-loud her longing for pure and white skin and also for true love. At this point of despair a catfish begins to talk to her from the surface of the water. “Are you a ghost?” she asks the catfish. “No, I am a catfish”, the catfish says. She eventually enters the water with abandon and has sex with the catfish. Something is being promised to her but we are not sure what it is.

There is a big bull tied to a tree. We stay with the bull for a while in the half-dark. We start to relate to him like any character in a movie. He makes a noise and we sort of know what it means. It seems kind of awful for such a big creature to be tied, by the neck, to a tree in the middle of a field. But maybe it’s ok. In a quick moment he yanks his rope free and lightly runs his giant body to the outskirts of the jungle and then stops there for a bit. Eventually, a man finds him. The man gently leads the bull back towards the field.

Uncle Boonmee has a farm where he grows tamarind and sweet and sour honey. Uncle Boonmee’s kidneys are failing and he thinks he will die in two days. He wonders if it’s because of his karma. “I was bad to the communists”, he says during his dialysis treatment. On the porch, he eats dinner with his sister-in-law and her friend when it is dark outside.

At the dinner table, the ghost of his long-dead wife appears. His ghost-wife looks like a normal wife, but younger. Then a monkey-ghost, the transformed body of his long-lost son, comes to sit down. The monkey-ghost looks amazing. He explains that he was trying to capture something with his camera, on the outskirts of the jungle, when he mated with a monkey-ghost and became a monkey-ghost himself. He explains that now the creatures and ghosts can sense Uncle Boonmee’s illness and are coming closer.

They all sit together at the table quietly. There is very little small talk. The whole movie feels like this, as though every living thing is cautiously acting and speaking as simply as possible in order to make room for some understanding.

Eventually, the wife-ghost and the monkey-ghost are shown photo albums of the years they have missed.

Later on, we are shown still photos too. The photos we see were taken in a field during the day: of a monkey-man being led out of the jungle with a rope tied around his neck by a soldier in camouflage. These photos are the strange cousins of horrific photos we are familiar with from history, but here, in this movie, we see and think about the photos in a different way. Which is good because they are difficult to understand in a logical way.

There is another photo of soldiers, laughing and smiling – it seems like something bad is happening to the monkey-man. Then there is a last photo of the soldiers and the monkey-man posing together, the rope still tied around his neck, everyone smiling. Maybe it is OK we think, but probably it really isn’t.

Later, back in real life at Uncle Boonmee's farm, Uncle Boonmee, his ghost-wife, his sister-in-law and her friend start on a journey away from the farm and into a field and down into the jungle. The ghost-wife is leading. Uncle Boonmee is trying to make the best sense he can out of his good and bad deeds before he dies. This journey is the best he can do now. They go deeper and enter a cave that looks like the frozen stalactites of centuries-old falling water. They travel deep down into the cave, Uncle Boonmee moving slowly. At the very bottom, they find a tiny pool of albino catfish. This is where Uncle Boonmee lies down.

The movie is not an exploration of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wild ideas. It is him trying wildly to make sense of the best and worst of life’s absurdities by expanding and examining them with intuitive logic.

If you are adept at intuitive logic (and with navigating the trauma that was the 20th century) his film will be as clear and seductive as early dusk. It will be as practical and as heartbreaking as any story about injustice, hope and despair could possibly be. Funny too. And beautiful.

The Social Network (2010) - based on a book by Ben Mezrich, screenplay by Aaron Sorkin & directed by David Fincher

2010-11-02T14:07:00.001-07:00

(I went to this at a big movie house with Misha Glouberman and Jon Davies. I was pretty excited to see it. After the screening, we realized our friend Carl Wilson was sitting behind us. We all sat around talking as the credits rolled. Jon was surprised at how the movie didn’t stupidly go on and on explaining what Facebook is - like you often see in some movies about blogs or in that 1998 Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan vehicle that explains what email is. One of us suggested that maybe it was easier with Facebook to find the actual number of those in the know so that they could count the potential audience and see that they didn’t have to worry about it so much.)

The Social Network falls into one of my favourite genres: The nearly-present-just-recently-past historical drama - like Oliver Stone’s W. (about George W. Bush while he was still in office) or Stephen Frears’ The Queen (about The Queen). One of the good side effects of telling a story still so tied to the present is that it becomes less plausible to make the main protagonist a hero or a god with all the banal evidence still in plain view. But in any case, seeing the more life-size protagonists and daily banalities blown up as big as cinema screen is just as surreal as watching a bunch of gods portrayed in a realistic setting. We are not missing the “awe” factor. The Queen in The Queen is freakishly life-size while the story, both weirder and more familiar than normal, remains a healthy contender for a new kind of epicness.

There’s always a bit of complaining when turning a section of life into a bio-pic. Primarily the complaints involve accusations that elements of the truth were sacrificed for the romance of the story, but it’s not just Hollywood that turns things into big stories – our brains do it all the time too, even with our own boring lives. Personal media framing websites like Facebook and Youtube help to speed this up. Luckily, most of us know better than to completely trust the history books or our own memories. Now we just have to learn how not to always trust our own eyes.

The Social Network is framed by a typical boy-losses-girl-then-says-internally-I’ll-show-you!-then-becomes-important-though-never-forgets-the-girl kind of story. The boy is a Harvard undergrad, Mark Zuckerberg. He is the founder of Facebook. Most of the movie is set at Harvard. Harvard looks more excitingly foreboding than Hollywood here with all of its old-school and discreet power. The girl goes to a different university and we can’t quite remember her name. Because the movie is framed this way, the narrative tension and resolution rests on this simple arc and not on the other details of the complicated Facebook founding story. This is good news because it allows the Facebook story to be ever-complicated and truthfully unresolved while we still get the delicious full sandwich of a tidy story.

The untidy part is up for interpretation. There are the Winkevosses - handsome, gentlemanly identical twin brothers. They are Harvard elites who are only a touch sinister. They seem to represent not only each other, but many of their kind that we can't see. They believe that they have gotten their idea of a Harvard-only networking site swiped from under their noses by Mark Zuckerberg. They probably have, but it's hard to worry about them too much. Some of us are not accustomed to this much privilege and it seems more wondrous and strange than what they think they got cheated out of.

After Mark Zuckerberg gets Facebook up and running, we're happy for him when he becomes friends with Sean Parker (founder of Napster). We imagine that it feels great to find a colleague who is just as obsessed by the same kind of creation as he is. We imagine that they have a lot to talk about. In this movie, this is when Mark Zuckerberg looks happiest, though the creators seem to credit the excitement to cheap glamour more than creative interest.

It is hard not to take pleasure here in a representation of the older generation's frequent blindness over Internet matters, as though the kids are talking about a pretend world that doesn't really matter. The freedom of not being seen feels thrilling here.

And it’s hard to get too upset with Mark Zuckerberg when he royally and legally cheats his best friend/ business partner, the sweetheart Eduardo Saverin, out of his fair share of the business. We’re not sure if this was one more move on top of a series of fights between the two friends, or if it was just a callous business decision. But we have known since the beginning of the movie that Mark Zuckerberg has always been a bit of a jerk, even when he was just a best friend that was a nobody. This last move should not have been too much of a surprise to Eduardo Saverin.

We feel for anyone who has been unpleasantly suprised by a friend even when they shouldn't have been surprised (Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg included). It happens to the best of us - especially when we are young and patient and become friends with people who might not be such a good fit. Nevertheless, we have some optimism that these two may re-friend each other some day (in the imagined post-movie movie-life of this particular movie).

Redemption (2010), directed by Katie Wolfe, written by Tim Balme, Renae Maihi & Katie Wolfe, based on a short story by Phil Kawana

2010-10-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

(I went to a program of shorts called “Moonshine” at the ImagineNative Film Festival with my friend Kerry Barber who was in town from the Yukon. We sat in the middle of the seats at the Jewish Community Centre. The program was a mix of funny and serious. This movie was on the serious side. Something the filmmaker said in the Q&A afterwards stuck with me for awhile.)

Two older Maoris teenagers sit on a couch. They are in a dark run-down room. Outside the windows, in bright light, we see a rural community that also looks run-down. We are guessing the “Redemption” in the title refers to a whole troubled community here, somewhere in New Zealand. The teenagers speak intimately with each other. They are kind and gentle with each other. They have already taken some drug that they are waiting to kick in and are now smoking joints. They don’t seem like the partying kind of drugs, more like the kind of drugs that are paradoxically used for survival. The lighting and camera movements are seductive as are the two actors. A man walks in while they are smoking a joint. He is wearing jogging clothes. He looks at them with disappointment. They look back at him with a bit of shame. They soon go outside to the very bright outdoors and then back into another dark structure. This is probably the girl’s bedroom.

The first thing they do is cover all of the windows with blankets. The girl does some more drugs. Then they get on the bed. On the bed, they take off each other’s clothes. It looks like something they have done many times before. Then they begin an elaborate ritual where they each take turns blowing gentle on each other’s wounds and scars. The girl has them all over her back and the boy, all over his legs. This also looks like something they have done many times before.

Other things happen and then morning comes. The boy wakes up and runs across to the kitchen in the blinding light of the outdoors. He makes tea. The kitchen is also very bright. At the last second, he thinks to put the teacup on a saucer and walks back out. Back in the bedroom, he sees that the girl hasn’t made it through the night. She has died, presumably from too many drugs. After some time, the boy cuts across the skin over his heart with a piece of the saucer that he had broken earlier and says goodbye by putting a touch of his blood on her lips. He goes back outside like this to tell the man in the jogging suit what has happened.

During the Q&A that followed the screening, the director, Katie Wolfe, mentioned that the man in the jogging suit was in the movie because the people funding the project thought that there needed to be more hope in the movie. She said that she had added this man who wasn’t doing drugs and who was jogging as a concession to this request.

Her answer seemed funny to me – and she seemed to find it a bit funny too. It seemed funny to me because hope was the primary element at the heart of the teenager’s story. The hope involved two people who think that they might be able to heal each other through this secret ritual of blowing on each other’s wounds. It isn’t the most practical act of healing, but it’s certainly the most elaborate act that a child could dream of. It involves two people who don’t know how to fix each other but who are trying very hard to do so. It almost seems like it could work – if they concentrate hard enough.

I like that Katie Wolfe was obliging and added the jogger. I think she used it to the movie’s advantage even if it doesn’t technically add what was perceived to be missing. I like the idea that if the heart of a project is truthful and strong, you don’t need to vigilantly protect it from new or foreign elements.

Here, the jogger mainly benefits the story by adding a bit of contrast and a small amount of comic relief. The jogger always looks a bit upset and irritated. His body is frustratingly less beautiful than the teenagers who are not exercising. His jogging outfits are somewhat defiant and… well… everything about him is less dramatic. He is also engaged in an activity of hope, just a more practical and grounded one - but no less difficult. His presence mainly reminds us that hope is the main activity all around.

Mansfield Park (1999) - written and directed by Patricia Rozema, based on Jane Austen's novel

2010-10-19T19:43:00.000-07:00

(I was having a great leisurely day and I went to the video store wanting something familiar and expensive. I picked out Mansfield Park, a movie by Patricia Rozema based on the Jane Austen book of the same name. The characters in Jane Austen’s work spend most of their time having complicated thoughts about intellect, about how to judge others and about their own emotions (how to have them, how to control them). I didn’t read a Jane Austen novel till I was 21. Prior to that I had always figured that most people have virtues and flaws in equal measure, even if the specifics of those virtues and flaws are very different. I figured the good and the bad are just highlighted or more deeply shadowed in different contexts. So from that logic, it seemed reasonable for people to move around a bit, till they find the best place to stand. Somehow it really had never occurred to me how much value or worthlessness one can ascribe to another human being until Jane Austen came along. The books are always a bit foreign to me, but they are always a complicated pleasure.

There was something wrong with the DVD or my DVD player and near the end of the movie – the top of the image went askew. So for about 15 crucial minutes of the movie, people’s heads were pretty far away from their bodies. It was pretty distracting.)

Fanny Price is sent off at the age of ten on a horse-drawn carriage, away from poverty and towards a mansion. When she arrives at the mansion, she starts a new life as a half relative/ half servant to her mother’s extended family, the Bertrams. The only person who is kind to her is her cousin Edmund Bertram, a virtuous young man who will eventually become a clergyman.

Fanny Price, and her four Bertram cousins all grow up together at Mansfield Park. In the day-to-day Fanny is often overlooked and disrespected (because of her different class background and unremarkable looks). It is easy to feel for her and the injustice of her specific situation, and easy to see that, though overlooked, she is intelligent and is watching everything. The bulk of the action takes place in 1808 when Fanny and her cousins are young adults. The narrative primarily involves other people in and around the household taking action and making mistakes. Fanny Price, however, takes no action and makes no mistakes. Fanny Price’s greatest virtue, in the end, is that she is the last one standing, having made no grave mistakes at all. Like a pay-off from a Hollywood movie, all of Fanny Price’s judgments and suspicions regarding the failings of others’ characters are proven to be sound.

Needless to say, she is difficult to fall in love with. In this movie, she continues to be difficult to fall in love with. In the book, Fanny Price is a bit dull, morbidly shy, pious and reserved with her compliments. Here in the movie, Fanny Price is stronger, more modern, less dull and more confident. I can imagine Rozema wanting to make Fanny Price more of a contemporary feminist hero, but the new qualities placed in the same frame create some weird side effects.

Now that she is more confident (and so therefore, more like the other young adults around) Fanny Price’s judgments (regarding love-choices, the worthiness of the arts, the vanity of women, the faults of people’s pasts) seem more harsh and also more confusing. Here, when we see her reserved pleasure at the eventual misfortune of others (valueless characters who were once cruel to her) we think: fair enough. Though now that here we can see her smile, and the modern glint in her eye, it all looks a little bit more like revenge.

To complicate matters, this Fanny Price comes into contact with damning information regarding her uncle’s involvement in the slave trade (in the book, it is more of a cryptic and passing reference). Now, the small protest Fanny Price musters for this occasion seems so inadequate and out of proportion to the clever judgments she formed against an adulterer, a snob, a cynical woman and a lovesick idiot.

Her uncle switches his business to the tobacco industry, and life at Mansfield Park pretty much continues as normal. I'm not sure if it's the early 19th century time period or the jarring of two different time periods that make this forgiving and forgetting feel so morally confusing and foreign.

These criticisms made me think of Jane Austen in a new way. It made me think more about what resources are possible if one’s mobility is taken away by societal restraints or by one’s own fear of displacement. Suddenly it seemed as though trees would be the most judgmental but forgiving, and the ocean the most generous but fleeting. If you are not free to go, maybe the ability to judge is one of your rare weapons - and forgiveness, a necessity.

Fanny Price marries the soon-to-be clergyman Edmund Bertam, the only person she seems to like. In the last scene of the movie, they walk arm in arm across the garden and into a house – still contained within the boundaries of Mansfield Park. Edmund suggests to Fanny a title for the book she has been working on (in this movie, Fanny Price is a writer). After he suggests a title, Fanny Price laughs, “That’s a terrible title” she says as they get smaller on the screen and the credits start to rise. Good luck Edmund! I think to myself.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) - written and directed by Gus Van Zant

2010-10-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

(I saw “My Own Private Idaho” for the first time when I was 14. I had just moved to a new city and was invited to a popular girl’s birthday party. In the middle of the party, in a small room with a TV and a VCR, the adults put the video in, hit play and left the room. Pretty shortly after it started, the room cleared out and the party continued elsewhere. I moved to the side of the room where people couldn’t see me from the door and watched it, alone, to the end. I couldn’t believe what I was watching – how good it was, how big it seemed and how warm it felt. I wasn’t sure why people had left. The people I was watching in the movie, who would never see me, were the first in a long line of distant friends. I bet there were a lot of grateful 14 years old in 1992 - lone kids at the wrong birthday parties who were as grateful as I was that River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves gracefully delivered Gus van Zandt to the television nearest them.

I thought of the movie recently when I picked out a book I’ve had for a while but never read – a printing of the original screenplay for “My Own Private Idaho”. The book was so old or cheaply made that the pages fell out when I opened it. I tried to read it for a bit, but it only made me want to watch the movie again. Which I did.)

We start out on the road with Mike (River Phoenix). Mike looks down the road both directions and talks to himself. He is not sure what’s forward or what’s backward so he thinks about the road. Mike thinks maybe it’s a special road, not just any old road, but his road. Maybe even a road he’s been on before. Maybe he's trapped in a really old story – as old as roads are. But maybe, also, it’s a new story that might be as new as Mike is. We're not sure.

Then he passes out. He has narcolepsy and passes out in stressful situations and we go with him, missing the big moments of tension but also the boring moments of getting to places. Mike wakes up while receiving a blow job from a John, Mike wakes up in the suburbs, Mike wakes up in Rome, cradled in an unsentimental pieta by his best friend Scott (Keanu Reeves).

Scott is like Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”. Prince Hal leaves the court and his father (the King Henry IV) in order to partake of unrefined pleasures in taverns with low companions. He takes up with Falstaff, a charismatic and corrupt fat man. Prince Hal’s idea from the very beginning of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” is that his eventual but surprising return to respectability will win him more respect than even if his character had been consistently respectable. He is banking on the old biblical story of the return of the prodigal son and the gratitude of a relieved father.

Here in the 20th century, Scott takes up with Fat Bob, a charismatic and corrupt man who lords over the young hustlers like a father. Scott calls Bob his psychedelic father, a truer father than his real father – but he does tease and play around with Bob mercilessly. Here, Scott’s true and best friend is Mike.

Mike and Scott laugh, journey and kill time together. We see the pleasure they have in each other’s company, how it is most fun and free when they are together - how seductive their small world is. We see Mike’s adoration and deep love for Scott. We see Scott’s small but kind gestures of protection towards Mike – Mike being someone whose physical and emotional vulnerabilities call for a bit of protecting. These gestures often happen when Mike is passed out or about to pass out– Scott covers him in his coat, Scott holds him so he doesn’t have to lie on the concrete fountain, Scott discreetly ends a performance from an avant-garde dancing John when he sees that the stress of the performance is starting to send Mike into a narcoleptic fit.

Like in Henry IV, Scott’s plan to forsake this low companion life and return to respectability is not a secret. But somehow people don’t listen to him or believe him, or believe that he could really leave them behind. But he never promises otherwise.

And Scott does indeed return to respectability. He abandons completely his low companions – returning home with a haircut and a woman, stepping into his father’s footsteps as a political elite and doesn’t look back.

Abandoning Fat Bob is one thing, but here, in the 20th century, to leave Mike behind seems incomprehensible.

But instead of betrayal, it feels like something else. It only feels like the romance, love and light has been drained from the landscape of the world we have just been shown, from Mike’s road and from Mike. Instead of the pain of betrayal, we feel the pain of the same world with different feelings – a world without the clever and kind Scott. Now we remember that Scott had nothing but choices (wealth or poverty, men or women, a heart or no heart). We remember that Mike had no choice in those matters. What is left of the world without Scott is literally a life not chosen, whereas before it had felt occasionally like a lucky day.

So we are left, strangely, not judging the authenticity of this friendship, this love or these kind acts – but only appreciating it immensely, seeing suddenly how rare these things are and how they can make everything look and feel different, how they can make everything feel so much better.

Near the end, two funerals take place in the cemetery. The Fat Bob has died from a broken heart after Scott's final rejection of him. The low companions slump around the cheap casket, drinking. Mike is there, glaring off across the expanse to the funeral of Scott’s father who has also died - this death occurring just in time for Scott to take over the family business. Here in the cemetery, Scott sits quietly with the respectable people. They are all dressed in black and are observing the ceremony.

Back across the field at Fat Bob's funeral, which is becoming louder and rowdier - we see Mike and the low companions start to scream Bob's name in celebratory mourning as they jump around and jump on the cheap casket lying above ground. We are reminded that Mike and his low companions have something Scott has recently lost in his new life – total reckless freedom to properly mourn the passing of a friend.

Town Bloody Hall (1971 – 1979) - event produced by Shirley Broughton & Theatre for Ideas, filmed by DA Pennebaker & later edited by Chris Hegedus.

2010-10-06T08:06:00.000-07:00

(My friends Sheila Heti and Lucas Rebick saw “Town Bloody Hall” over the weekend. Sheila called on Monday to see if I wanted to watch it, she said I would like it. My TV was broken, so I walked over in the rain and sat down on a couch that only had one leg. Sheila used to have a small tv, but now it is very big.)

It’s April 30, 1971 and we’re at New York City’s Town Hall. There are a few tables on stage with white tablecloths and several microphones. There is one podium off to the side. We watch the people on stage and in the audience settle into their seats. People seem excited.

I am not one to normally be nostalgic for the past, but man (!) does everyone look good. Everyone looks totally different from one another and there is an absence of polar fleece (not to be invented until 1979). Is that a fox around Germaine Greer’s glamorous shoulders? Jill Johnston looks like the fun member of the Ramones. Norman Mailer (who is the only man on stage) looks like Norman Mailer.

The other heavyweights, along with the three just mentioned, are Jacqueline Ceballos and Diana Trilling. Susan Sontag and other famous writers fill the seats in the audience closest to the stage and will soon ask some hilarious questions. Norman Mailer has just published The Prisoner of Sex, and Germain Greer, The Female Eunuch.

The event was put together by the Theatre for Ideas and here are the rules of the evening: Norman Mailer is the moderator, all five panelists are allowed 10 minutes to make a speech at the podium, Norman Mailer is to cut people off when they have gone over their time and also to then ask them a question (in response to their speech) that they are not allowed to answer till the end of the evening.

All five panelists are incredibly intelligent and have interesting, complicated opinions, especially Germain Greer who is like an inexplicably calm lightening rod. Each say totally different things from the others. Most of them can barely look at each other as they argue their position with force or respond to each other’s question - except for Jacqueline Ceballos who seems to be enjoying herself immensely as an on-stage spectator.

The audience seems ready to burst with their wavering reactions to what is being said – and occasionally does. One man from the audience starts screaming incoherently about “humans” as he wrestles to put on his jacket and storms out. Later, another woman bursts in angrily yelling about not getting in because there were no seats left. She is escorted back out.

This structure set up by Theatre for Ideas creates really great theatre. For instance, having Norman Mailer function literally as the authoritarian for the event both mimics life and also reveals its inherent absurdity. If the event had been set up as an ideal political structure for a panel discussion on women’s liberation (i.e. the man not in charge) the “art” wouldn’t be there to bring out the tension and humor or the playful and painful metaphors. This choice shows Theatre for Ideas’ interest and skill in art over an interest or skill in setting a political standard – or it shows, maybe, that they believe art will help get them there faster and in a more amusing manner.

The choice of Norman Mailer is great too. Though he is, by our 2010 standards, wildly sexist (presenting while on the panel, for instance, a strangely illogical semi-defense of wife-beating), he is not smarmy or condescending. There is no grin upon his face. He is exasperated and humourless, like a great clown. And, like a great clown, he keeps accusing the women libbers of being humorouless. Then, when the women make great jokes, Norman Mailer accuses them of being from Brooklyn.

The monologues are presented from the podium against the mass of the sometimes supportive, sometimes jeering, and sometimes dismissive audience. This is where I remember the value of a live event. It is easy to forget that a monologue isn’t just a conversation with oneself. It can also be the pushing of a thought into public space. And this movie shows that process. It is very clear that enduring the jeering while remaining firm about what one is saying, or persuading the audience through rhetoric to be cheered on, can be as important as what is being said. It is even clear here (maybe never more true than at New York’s Town Hall in 1971) that the visibility and unwavering stance of the speakers was as important as the details or arguments in the monologues.

The movie is thrilling and entertaining. Afterward, Sheila and I wondered about the filmmakers not doing anything with the footage till 1979. I thought that maybe (as has been our own occasional experience with live performance and cameras) the event was so intense that they filmmakers just couldn’t think about it for awhile. That maybe they put the footage away in a drawer for their own sanity.

My guess was corrected by a few meager facts on the internet. The filmmaker DA Pennebaker, had been told about the event from Norman Mailer. DA Pennebaker went down to Town Hall to shoot it. Afterwards, he put the footage aside thinking the footage “showed how silly women were, taking themselves so seriously.” A few years later, a new editor working with him, Chris Hegedus, ended up salvaging the project. As DA Pennebaker put it, Chris Hegedus “disabused me of that idea”.

There is always jeering, dismissal and prejudice – thankfully this movie is proof that brilliant monologues, brave stances and thoughtful art structures sometimes make it through the belly of the beast.

I'm Still Here (2010) - a movie by Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix

2010-09-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

(I saw Joaquin Phoenix's notorious 2008 Letterman Show appearance when he presented himself as a non-responsive, sunglassed and bearded guest. He was mumbling about becoming a hip hop artist. I thought that he was playing with performance in a reality-situation and I was pretty curious. Contemporary culture is still a bit fuzzy on how and when to assign authenticity to the different types of interaction, perspective and persona creation that continue to be created by new technologies. The general public is becoming as attuned, and as confused, with the concept of persona as actors are. A good actor even in his sleep, Joaquin Phoenix seemed as likely a candidate as any to explore persona in a reality-style work (where there is often much sleeping). So I was excited when I heard about the movie "I'm Still Here" being presented as a documentary. When it was announced, by the creators, as a hoax during the Toronto Film Festival, I felt disappointed. A hoax suggest more of a put on than an experiment. It also suggested a bit of a failure. Unambiguous creative sucess rarely needs to come with such foreceful, and unambitious, explanations. I went to see it anyway with my friend Julia Rosenberg, a movie producer, who had also been following the process. We had popcorn.)

Joaquin Phoenix decides to leave acting. It’s confusing being an actor and also confusing to be a celebrity. I believe this. He looks good, he’s hiding out in a well-worn hoodie, smoking at night on a grassy hill and looking down at the bright lights of Los Angeles. His friend, Casey Affleck is filming him. “I don’t want to play the character of Joaquin anymore” Joaquin Phoenix says. This scene is physically dark, seductive and promising. We don’t care if it’s documentary or staged because we suspect that, as with any good documentary or fiction, something truthful might be happening here. Unfortunately this is the most truthful-feeling part of the movie.

Joaquin Phoneix spends the rest of the movie smoking pot, growing his hair, yelling at his assistants and chasing down Diddy (formerly P. Diddy), the famous music producer. Joaquin Phoenix's plan is to become a successful hip hop artist by finding Diddy and having Diddy produce his album. When securing Diddy's help fails, along with Joaquin Phoenix's meager and wildly unsucessful 4 or 5 public hip hop performances, Joaquin Phoenix collapses, mentally and physically, and then returns to his birth place for some water redemption.

In the last scene Joaquin Phoenix walks down a river. It is shallow at first and then becomes deeper. We follow him from behind. There is some "movie music" overlaid - the kind of music that reminds you to have feelings now. It doesn't give me feelings, it makes the scene feel clumsy, long and sentimental. A joke or not - I don't know. But at this point in the movie, I was needing some "real" in my "reality tv". I wanted the music to stop and to at least, after enduring this movie, be allowed to indulge in the refreshingly natural sound of a quiet river. If Joaquin Phoenix was going back to nature, I wanted to come with him.

It's hard to know what was intended. Did they set out to make fun of reality tv? Were they interested in mocking the public - hoping to hold up a mirror, showing them embracing Joaquin Phoenix as a hip hop artist because he was famous - but then were derailed by the public's poor reaction to the idea? Were they hoping to say something about the insanity of celebrity culture but then didn't quite know what to say? Were they trying for a remarkable performance? Was the absense of any visible sign of hard work (on the part of Joaquin learning to be a hip hop artist and Casey Affleck learning to be a director - or the two as artistic collaborators) an indication of the creators conceit of a famous fame-seeker not having to work hard - or was it a genuine misconception about how one goes about making art? Was Joaquin's painful "failure" after simply not securing one of the world's most famous music producers and not doing well at a few gigs supposed to really represent genuine failure? Or was it to show someone who is bound by being an actor? Was it all really just to say that something that looked real was scripted? Was the music at the end supposed to be funny?

I wouldn't ask these question if there was something truthful here at the centre to hold on to (I consider a biting satire truthful for instance). If there was something truthful at the centre, then all these questions would be trivial and besides the point. But at the end, I just had the questions and a wish that the creators had worked longer or harder or had taken the ideas to a more developed place. I think there was a lot of potential. I hope Joaquin Phoenix tries something like this again, just... with everything else different. Much has been made of the ridiculousness of Joaquin Phoenix suddenly becoming a hip hop artist, but no one has mentioned how crazy it is for Casey Affleck to suddenly become the director of a contemporary reality experiment. The traditional well-oiled machine that makes a Hollywood movie might have been an easier choice.

When Joquin Pheonix finally manages a meeting with a hesitant and wary Diddy, Diddy eventually looks over at Joaquin and says slowly, “You can’t come into this shit disrespectfully.” I agree, this shit is hard - respect is essential. That goes for reality tv, experimental movies, and hip hop (acting was properly respected in this motion picture). Joaquin Phonix nods along with me. I believe him.

!Women Art Revolution (2010) – written and directed by Lynn Hershman

2010-09-14T10:41:00.001-07:00

(In a rush during the start of the Toronto International Film Festival, I decided to pick movies based on the names alone. Going over the first two days of programming, my eyes stopped at “!Women Art Revolution” and I investigated. The movie is from Lynn Hershman. Her 2007 film “Strange Culture”, a piece that documents a personal tragedy in artist Steve Kurtz’s life that led to an FBI investigation of his artwork, was one of my favourite things at a past Whitney Biennale. “Strange Culture” was one of the few things in the show that genuinely confused my sense of art, government and reality. Playing on a little tv in the corner of one of the galleries, it looked like an unassuming but well-developed portal out of the museum.

I was late getting to the theatre because I ran into a parade, the first sign of which was two women walking down the street with 4 legs, 1 torso, 2 heads and two enormous plush breasts protruding from their uni-shirt. “There go some balls”, I thought as they passed in front of my bicycle. I was late to the theatre but was ushered to my seat in the dark. After the screening, the director thanked artists featured in the movie who had also made it to the premiere - names, for the most part, that have been familiar to me since I was a teenager beginning to investigate art. The last shout-out was for the Guerrilla Girls. I was startled to see that they were sitting next to me. Two well-dressed women, in gaping-mouth gorilla masks, stood up and took a bow.)

*Below image from Ana Mendieta's "Silueta" series, 1976

This movie portal starts from the museum (most of the artists featured have found some success in the art world) but goes back in time, approximately 40 years, to when women could barely get into them. The movie is pieced together from footage shot in between.

As is true with most hopeful acts of defiance against enormous adversity, hearing these cultural workers talk with humour and self-awareness about their struggle to have a voice in the world is unavoidably moving. I specifically fell in love with Marcia Tucker, a curator I was unfamiliar with. She started The New Museum in 1977. Like the movie, she seemed a fountain of good things with very few blind spots. I was sad to eventually discover (in the duration of the movie) that I had learned of her too late - as she died in 2006. But I will look for her book, A Short Life of Trouble.

In the movie, a thesis develops. Lynn Hershman suggests that these past forty years (and counting) of feminist art creation have been dominated by performance, role-playing and persona because these are the activities necessary for creating new spaces and new ways to be – creating bigger (and less oppressive and less boring) spaces for women to live and work in.

An interesting moment comes when Janine Antoni, a performance artist from the younger generation, talked about an experience she had in graduate school. Her professor, Mira Schor, looked at her work and asked if she had ever heard of Anna Mendieta or Hannah Wilke or Carolee Schneemann. She hadn’t, so she went to the library to investigate. There, she found absolutely nothing on any of the artists. Eventually, when Mira Schor brought in her own personal catalogues and clippings from home, Janine Antoni looked through the work and thought “I am making the work of an earlier generation.”

It is a pleasurable idea, and not one I take for granted, to think that some art really needs to be in the world – that there is actually a great deal of order to the often random-seeming nature of art creation. It is interesting to think that if some art doesn’t find its rightful spot in the library, this art will continue to be made until it arrives there.

Donny Darko (2001) & Southland Tales (2007) - both written and directed by Richard Kelly, Donny Darko exec produced by Drew Barrymore

2010-09-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

(My friend Ryan Kamstra, a poet and a musician, recently asked me if I could articulate why “Donny Darko” worked as a movie when “Southland Tales” didn’t. They are both poetic, intuitive and unlikely Hollywood science fiction narratives, set in the near past and near future respectively and grounded in the contemporary. They were both made by Richard Kelly.

A lot of people love “Donny Darko”. A lot of people have defended “Southland Tales”. It’s easy to understand why – “Southland Tales” is an unusual movie that seems to have been made with just enough hope to strain past private despair about America, the war, the end of the world and celebrity in order to try to say something meaningful about it all. It is the kind of movie that most people I know would want to make – if they were the kind of people who made Hollywood movies. All that being said – I bet Richard Kelly had wanted “Southland Tales” to touch more people than it managed to. I bet it was confusing why “Donny Darko” touched so many people when “Southland Tales” struggled to. This is how I understand my friend's question.)

Donny Darko is a teenager who lives in a big white house. He is very smart and a little off – luckily his family is also very smart and a little off too. A tall bunny with a scary silver face, named Frank, communicates to Donny Darko in hallucinations. Frank often calls Donny Darko out of bed and Donny Darko, sleepwalking, follows him out of the house. Donny Darko often wakes up on the road or in a field or in a golf course. One morning, after waking up on a golf course, he returns home in his pajamas and learns that, in a freak accident, a jet engine fell from the sky and crashed into his bedroom. He was not killed because he was sleeping on the golf course.

Life continues. Life is the suburbs, the bus stop, the private school, the television and the Iowa landscape. There is the school bully, a dearth of good friends, a little girls’ dancing troupe, the national election and the town’s beloved motivation speaker who spreads his own brand of gobbledygook. And though it is hard to see where meaning is in this life, the whole movie has the feeling of a meaningful dream that you can’t quite remember – a suggestion that meaning is hidden everywhere, but we just can't quite see it.

Frank’s visits increase as do coincidences in Donny Darko’s life. Donny Darko is not sure if he is a high-functioning schizophrenic or someone who has been chosen for a great mystical mission. We don’t know either.

“Donny Darko” simultaneously tells two mirror-image stories: one is of someone going over and over random events in their life until they seem to be full of meaning and etched in stone by god; the other is of someone going over and over random events in their life because their destiny was etched in stone by god and they want to stay on the right path. The very beautiful thing about Donnie Darko is that it is both. It is meaningless and aching with meaning. It is meaningful and heartbreakingly senseless.

And then there is “Southland Tales”.

Boxer Santaros (an action star with Republican ties) starts out with amnesia, a porn-star girlfriend, and a screenplay. We’re not sure how he got there, how long he has been in this relationship, or why he seems so untroubled by his amnesia. Though the back story isn’t clear, we are easily fascinated by Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) and his girlfriend Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). They are both a pleasure to watch. This situation is followed by time-warps, neo-marxists, poetic tag-teams of conservative presidential candidates, internet surveillance, riots, quantum soul-splitting and other catastrophes. Boxer Santaros doesn’t know what’s going on and neither do we.

Luckily there is an equally fascinating, gun-wielding and bible quoting narrator, Iraq war veteran Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake). Unfortunately, he is a poet.

Some movies don’t work at all – things are consistently off key or, say, barely present. But “Southland Tales” is a different kind of not-working. In “Southland Tales” - though scenes contain humour, powerful moods and dynamic tensions - it is often difficult to understand what is happening, what people’s intentions are or even just who is who. It is hard to grasp the full weight and meaning of the narrative elements – and there are A LOT of narrative elements.

Near the end of the movie, when Boxer Santaros and Madeline Frost Santaros (his wife played by Mandy Moore) are reunited, alone together, in a luxury suite - no words of explanation or exasperation are shared. Instead, Boxer Santaros quotes Jane’s Addiction’s cryptic song of apocalypse “Three Days”. Madeline Frost Santaros quotes it back to him.

It is exciting to hear Dwayne Johnson quoting Jane’s Addiction to Mandy Moore with brutal sincerity in their luxury suite. If you sliced “Southland Tales” into 16 sections, you might have 16 remarkable poems. It is enough that Dwayne Johnson is quoting Jane’s Addiction to Mandy Moore in a luxury suite – that is a brilliant art show. That is something to think about. It is also exciting to witness an Iraq war scarred Justin Timberlake intentionally misquote T.S. Eliot to us while swiveling a machine gun around a crowd of civilians in a near-future Venice Beach.

But it is a very difficult task to turn 16 remarkable poems into a narrative movie. It is a lot for the director to control and a lot for the audience to pay attention to. In our attempt to grasp the full meaning of the complicated narrative (we assume that the director has given the narrative equal importance) AND juggle the depth of our culture’s beloved poetry, we frequently loose grasp of both. We are not good jugglers. So the power of the narrative's turning points frequently escape us.

We understand narrative as well as we understand poetry (which is to say – not very much). But we have a great sense of both. We want to take meaninglessness and turn it into meaning, and we want to take what the world tells us is meaning and turn it into meaninglessness. It takes a lot of skill and luck to stay in the middle of those things.

In the familiar world of “Donny Darko”, we hold onto to the humble discoveries of meaning as tightly as Donny Darko does – they appear so infrequently. As we linger in this world, we also eventually begin to take the meaningless things and turn them into meaning - just as Donny Darko is beginning to do. There is not much else to do here and we have some time to spare. We begin to make out a beautiful and crazy (or senseless and sad) pattern. It's a poem that's inseparable from a narrative, a narrative involving meaningless tragedy and time travel - my favourite kind.

Southland Tales, section 16:

Greenberg (2010) – story by Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh, written and directed by Noah Baumbach

2010-08-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

(I was thinking about “Greenberg” a few days ago while sitting on a dock watching a lot of jet skis go by. Most of the jet skis towed large children behind them on inner tubes. It really gave this sense of momentous movement while really, no one was actually moving. It made me feel like everything was a little bit wrong. I was also trying to remember if jet ski accidents involve mostly people on jet skis – or people under them who happen to be swimming in the water. This is when I thought of the movie “Greenberg” because “Greenberg” is about a man who complains a lot. I then jumped into the water. I had watched “Greenberg” a few months ago with my friends Sholem Krishtalka and Jon Davies and my boyfriend Misha Glouberman. I remember that we all took a cab home because it was raining – and how warm it felt in the cab as compared to the cinema.)

The main character in “Greenberg” is named Greenberg. Greenberg is a lonely man who complains a lot and doesn’t offer very much. We know that he had an early life as an almost-famous rock star. That was followed by a long period of wandering capped by a short stay in a mental health centre. His main creative output now consists of writing letters of complaint to the government, media agencies and corporations. The movie begins with his return to Los Angeles to stay at his brother’s house while his brother and family are out of town. He takes care of the dog, tries to build a dog house, begins to date the woman who is employed as a kind of servant to his brother’s family, sees old friends and meets the younger generation. The whole process is totally unpleasant. One feels quite a lot for the people who have to talk to him, one worries for the woman who is starting to date him, and one is charmed by the younger generation’s sympathetic/ bemused expressions while Greenberg deconstructs them after taking some drugs.

I always feel a little bit hesitant about giving the characters in Noah Baumbach’s movies so much of my attention. They are often culturally rich, unquestioning of their entitlement and hoard the scraps of love, attention and kindness that come their way like intensely hungry but confusingly plump children. The “Squid and the Whale” and “Margot at the Wedding” had pleasure, intelligence and humour but the rapt attention on such ungenerous characters makes me a little baffled and I’m never quite sure what it is that we are hunting for in there. “Greenberg”, however, I could totally understand.

We see versions of Greenberg all the time in movies. Intelligently critical people who know things are all wrong and crappy – who feel compelled to complain because they have a clear perspective on the people who are making the world a worse place. Though often filled with insecurity and discomfort, these figures are often remarkably unselfconscious about their own negative contributions. Pleasure in their characters or empathy for their positions come when we see them effectively change their environments, or listen to their moving songs, or laugh at their good jokes.

The very interesting and unusual thing about “Greenberg” is that Baumbach takes away this complainer’s status and his poetry. Greenberg is still an artist, but his only output are the often petty letters of complaint to Starbucks, the state of California and The New York Times. Baumbach has taken the sexy out of the asshole - he has taken the moral weight away from the complainer. It makes this kind of character easier to deconstruct. It makes Greenberg’s journey so unpleasant to witness that the movie begs for a narrative change.

The sliver of narrative change, and the best part of the movie, comes near the end when Greenberg finally asks one of his few remaining friends to give him an outsider opinion on his person. The question seems to slow time, lower the volume on the music – it makes us lean in. It is night, on the edges of a pool party. His tall, patient friend hesitates but then offers some constructive criticism of Greenberg-the-person. This question and the answer felt as though a giant crack had opened up on the screen letting a vertical flood of light in. The moment, realistically, only lasts for a half second before Greenberg’s unfruitful defense-mechanisms take over, flip out and shut out any of the information – but the great question has been asked and life has been stirred. And we are reminded that self-consciousness is a necessary virtue.

Mind Game (2004) - written and directed by Masaaki Yuasa, based on the comic by Robin Nishi

2010-08-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

(I watched this animated movie at home with my boyfriend. We were going to go to the movies, but decided to stay home and watch a DVD and make popcorn. I didn’t know anything about it other than a probability website estimated that we would both like it 90% and that it played at the MOMA. Also, I liked the title “Mind Game”. I liked that it wasn’t pluralized, that it promised just one game.)

A young man, who doesn’t have enough courage to try to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart or to become a great comic book artist, gets shot in the anus by an angry gangster.

It happens at his childhood sweetheart’s family restaurant. He’s there with her by chance (she is now a beautiful young woman). The young woman’s new fiancé (stronger and more handsome than our man), her father (a no-good womanizing drunk), and her older sister (who runs the restaurant) are also there when a tired gangster and an angry gangster walk into the restaurant looking for the drunk father. The father quickly slips under the bar to hide. The beautiful young woman stands up to the angry gangster, and is then knocked down by him. The strong fiancé goes after the angry gangster but gets knocked unconscious. Our young man cowers in the corner on all fours. The angry gangster returns to the beautiful young woman, suddenly interested in raping her. Our young man makes a fearful noise from the corner. The sound distracts the angry gangster and he moves towards our whimpering man. He rests his gun against the young man’s anus. As the young man tries to get out a sentence, the angry gangster pulls the trigger.

As the bullet leaves our young man’s head, he goes to heaven. God (a radically shifting form) is getting ready for a date and explains to our man, with a great deal of distraction and irritation, what is happening and tells the young man to walk over there (God points somewhere to the right), towards his disappearance. The man begins walking to the right, but then he suddenly turns and runs the other way – back towards the world. God, now a tiger, tries to catch him, but can’t keep up with the young man’s sudden burst of courage. As the young man falls to earth, God watches from above, now admiring, and says quietly, I’m on your side. The young man arrives back in the world in the moments before he is shot. This time, things will be different.

This time, he saves the day and himself, killing the angry gangster. He flees the bar with the two women and leaves the drunk father and the tired gangster to each other. More heroics and panics ensue until the three young people end up in the belly of a whale with an old man. There, they have no other choice but to love, live, laugh and pursue the culinary, comic book and performing arts. Eventually, they attempt an escape through the whale’s mouth.

Before all this, the movie begins with a sequence of brief scenes. Some of it is familiar, but most is not. We can make out some “old footage” of westerners arriving from the sky with Astro Boy there to confront them. There is also a familiar 70 disco scene, a little boy getting a watch for a present, a beautiful young woman racing for the subway. Watching these scenes move by so quickly makes you feel a little bit like a confused and passive observer - observing things you don't yet understand.

After the main story, we see this sequence again. Now we are familiar with most of the footage, the unfamiliar parts were from the story, some representing the characters’ earlier choices. There is also some new footage of the many possible futures for the characters.

I think the movie can be understood in lots of different ways. But for me, it told one of my favourite stories: The story about how maybe a person can slip back into the recent past and stop a terrible thing from happening - only to then learn that time is real and the past can't be changed.

I’m not sure if this is an old story (told repeatedly by humans to themselves as they see some terrible event of their present turn into unchangeable history) or one that grows specifically out of the meaningless tragedies, missing gods and the puzzling physics of the (mostly) 20th century.

Here, in the beautiful “Mind Game”, it’s a video game fantasy of trying to stop something terrible from happening that has already happened. The movie contains literally shifting perspectives, subjective confusion, jokes about perceptual misunderstandings, a character wondering aloud if video games can be real - if this mind game can be real. It explores the path of being as heroic as you want to be, of saving the day (even a day that has already been written), of winning your love with patience and courage, and even of learning how to be an artist while killing time in the belly of a whale.

The heartbreaking thing about this movie is that it almost seems true.

The Company (2003) - directed by Robert Altman, written by Robert Altman and Neve Campbell

2010-08-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

(I watched this with my friend Sheila Heti late at night in a cabin in the woods. We projected it onto a wall with our make-shift entertainment system. We were under the shared assumption that it was possibly the most entertaining movie that we brought with us. Every 25 minutes or so Sheila would say, “I think maybe I’ve seen this before.”)

There is a ballet company. The Company is in Chicago. The director wears a yellow scarf. He calls people “baby” or sometimes “genius.” A “genius” comes from Canada to choreograph a new ballet, “The Blue Snake.” There is not enough money to make “The Blue Snake,” but the director (easy and charming) says he will find it. The dancers continue to practice and perform, sometimes in a mirrored studio and sometimes to an audience in the rain. Sometimes new dancers arrive, sometimes dancers quit. Some of the dancers live together in a crowded apartment because maybe they don’t get paid a lot. Ryan is one of the dancers. Ryan lives in a big apartment all alone, maybe because she works a night job as a waitress. One night after her nightshift, she plays pool by herself in a bar. James Franco watches her. He has come to the bar after his nightshift as a chef. He goes back to her apartment with her and makes her an omelet in the morning. Ryan’s family comes out to a lot of her performances. They are clearly supportive if not greatly responsible for her career as a dancer. No one talks much. Sometimes the dancers get injured. When one is injured, another ballet dancer takes his or her place. Ryan is in the spotlight after a few others have suffered injuries. Her spotlight is brief, injuring herself while dancing “The Blue Snake.” She’s okay about it, even smiling, and James Franco crosses the stage awkwardly to give her flowers, while the dancers bow after the performance is done. In the last scene, the dancers come out of the mouth of a giant head and dance around. The head looks wrathful and also a little bit like the company’s director.

The best part of the movie was during The Company’s “Christmas Roast” when the dancers, on a make-shift stage, dress as different members of The Company and act out skits representing scenarios that we have already seen. Although the skits were literal representations, they were loose and playful. It was kind of nice to remember that the dancers, like us, have witnessed the scenarios they were part of. Now they are making fun of one of the romantic dances that happened in a thunderstorm. Now they are making fun of the “genius from Canadia.” It made the rest of the movie seem even more starkly like real life – lacking in poetry and even in .. “representation.”

It’s pretty interesting when a movie doesn’t work – when the poetry seems absent, the metaphors don’t resonate, when the art seems missing. It makes the movies that work seem like miracles. It’s especially interesting when a movie like this doesn’t work – a movie where the skill and craft and the director’s experience are all clearly on display.

Failure always seems to be an interesting part of good art. I guess it is easier to fall on your face if you happen to be reaching out far. Some failures are super interesting or easier to forgive than others, like: the bountiful missteps of Marlon Brando; the masterpieces of David Cronenberg that are aiming for the multiplex but end up at the cineforum; the David Lynch-like silence that sometimes follows David Lynch movies; the ambition in Sofia Coppola’s awkwardly revealing “Marie Antoinette” (though to be fair, I didn’t see the end because in the cinema in which I was watching it, the film caught on fire);the incaution in Woody Allen’s one-movie-a-year output (also often awkwardly revealing). Groping and searching and hubris always seem more generous than an immaculate career – more like contributions.

Nothing horrible is revealed in “The Company” other than the fact that it didn’t really work. I am guessing that a movie about an art system is a bigger challenge than a movie about a love affair. I guess at the end of “The Company” we are meant to see the giant head on stage as perhaps the art itself – spitting out dancers with broken bodies or failed or briefly glorious careers. It didn’t really resonate as it was supposed to, but I could see what the movie was maybe going for: art is as a merciless god, barely paying attention to the participants who offer their lives to it — some failing, some falling, some shining.

It’s okay, I think, as I gaze at the hand-painted ballet set, at the wrathful god’s wide-open mouth, projected onto the cottage wall (my friend half asleep beside me): It is only a god of the humans’ creation.

Le Bonheur (Happiness) - (1965) written & directed by Agnès Varda

2010-07-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

( I went to Suspect Video, the best video store in Toronto, to look for Agnès Varda’s 2004 “Ydessa and the Bears” but they didn’t have it. Though it is one of my favourite movies, I haven’t seen “Ydessa and the Bears” anywhere other than at a 2004 film festival. I think maybe it was never distributed. Instead, I rented Agnès Varda's “Le Bonheur (Happiness)” because I had never seen it before and because it was in colour. I popped it in when I got home just to see the what the first 5 minutes was like. It was so weird and gorgeous that I didn't turn it off.)

“Happiness” starts with a young family. Their joy with each other is obvious and they have a simple, pleasurable life. The husband then falls in love with a different woman whom he sees often in his work. The husband and the other woman begin an affair that is easy, happy and not so sordid. The husband reasons that what he has is simply a double happiness. When his wife points out, during a picnic in the country, that he seems doubly happy, the man looks suddenly troubled and confesses to his wife that he loves both her and another woman. The wife is initially hurt but then seems to quickly follow his reasoning and recover. What is best for the family is best for her. The husband and wife then have reconciliatory sex, there on the picnic blanket in the country. She wakes up before he does, leaves him and their two small children who are taking a nap close by, walks down to the lake, and drowns herself.

This is followed by alarm, an appropriate mourning period and then a gentle reconciliation of the two remaining lovers. At this reconciliation, they decide to be together. In the following scene, the woman walks to work the next day. Foreboding music only comes once in this movie, and it comes here. To me, the foreboding music sounds like a warning of moral judgment approaching. I peer around the woman in the movie’s frame as I watch her walk through the town, looking for reproach. It is a small town after all, and we are inside a fable.

But no stones are thrown. And there are no real bad intentions from anyone's side. The foreboding music is for something more sinister: life moving on easily, happiness returning. We watch one human effortlessly replace another: in a marriage, at a family picnic, in the children's bedrooms, with not a whimper of protest from the universe.

Behind the camera, Varda is a happy and curious God - as interested and amazing by a vase with flowers as she is in a family at dinner or in the strangeness of elbows as they move about during sex. I think when things comes naturally to one, one is often suspicious of those things. And here, it seems as though Varda the director is like the husband – each scene of the movie filled effortlessly with spaces and objects and people of incomparable value and importance but all taken in with equal attention and wonder. Varda would have been a very good painter.

The only review I could find for “Happiness” was a 1966 New York Times review from A.H.Weiler. Though Weiler praised Varda’s movie in some ways, he also says “Miss Varda's dissection of amour, as French as any of Collette's works, is strikingly adult and unembarrassed in its depiction of the variety of love, but it is as illogical as a child's dream”.

I wonder if people said that about Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis" (where a family's main breadwinner, Gregor, wakes up one morning to discover that he is a monstrous verminous bug) which "Happiness” made me think of - particularly at its most sinister and truthful moment. This comes at the end, after the nightmarish alienation and slow death of the now repulsive and useless Gregor. After he dies, Gregor's family leaves the house together in a state of tremendous relief and take a tram towards the country - towards fresh air. They are suddenly giddy with the future and with possibility. This is when the parents notice how their remaining child has become so beautiful, voluptuous and strong. We catch a tiny glimpse of the parents imagining a potentially prosperous new future through her. We see her in the instant before (we imagine), before she is ushered into the rotting shoes of the family bread winner.

Both fables make you feel sorry for humans - and also quite wary of them and their human natures. We all know what it’s like to feel like a cog in the system, but it is easy to forget that our homes and families are systems too. That even there, where our beauty and usefulness are often most greatly appreciated, we are so easily replaced.

Wild Ocean (2008) - from GIANT SCREEN FILMS

2010-07-19T21:27:00.000-07:00

(I went to two screenings this week. One was at Ontario Place (an artificial island of amusements jutting out over a small section of Toronto’s waterfront). There, on the island’s Cinesphere, I saw a section of “Wild Ocean”. The other screening was an evening of short works curated by Jon Davies (including scientific and novelty films and contemporary art videos). It was called “Animal Drag Kingdom” and was screened at night outside in a downtown Toronto courtyard.)

At the water park in Ontario Place, there are only three rides and really no place to swim (the fences keep you out of the lake). So after we went down all of the rides, my boyfriend and I walked around the made-for-human-amusement island. The island has beer stands and donut tents, an exhibit on cute animals and an extensive and confusingly obvious exhibit on “The Weather”. The attendants at the most promising amusement, the Cinesphere, at first didn’t let us in because we only had bathing suits on, but we wore them down.

We walked into the spherical theatre maybe 20 minutes in to “Wild Ocean”. The screen, filled up with the ocean, was enormous. It was a little disorienting to suddenly see dolphins, sharks, humans, penguins and sardines running wild. It was like the opposite of an aquarium. The movie’s narrative was about how the dolphins, sharks, humans and penguins were after the sardines.

I went alone to the “Animal Drag Kingdom” because I like animals. I sat in a folding chair 3 rows back from the free standing screen. There were about 9 videos. It was a really beautiful night.

Movies always involve seeing things through someone else’s eyes.. unless you make the movie yourself. It is very effective to see something through someone else’s eyes – even though it is always hard to tell how great or how little someone else’s eyes are connecting with your brain – or how successfully someone else’s brain is connecting with your eyes.

In "Animal Drag Kingdom", we run through a lot of eyes very quickly. We move from being an animated pig in a bonnet mourning the random hit and run of our trench-coat clad neighbour chicken - that chicken went down as tragically as Meryl Streep would have, we think (Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis' animation "When the Day Breaks") / to looking at 1960s black and white film footage of families at zoos with our 1960s professor who is doing his best to find platonic meaning in the gestures of the universal family man. If you don't know what the hell is going on, we think, you might as well start at the zoo (experimental anthroplogical lecture "Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos") / to being the humorously clunky or painfully indifferent camera stuck in the woman-who-is-afraid-to-die's apartment. We cannot run away when the cat vomits in front of us and the woman is talking to the psychic on the psychic hot-line because we have no legs (Kathy High's "Everyday Problems of the Living")/ to watching a family play-act a surgical procedure that turns their little girl into a cheetah. Then we are a little girl walking around her house with her new cheetah eyes. We think, things look different now that we are a little girl-cheetah waking up from play-acting surgery (Kristen Lucas's "Smaller and Easier to Handle") / to thinking we are watching an art video of a man filming himself and a crow, a crow that is tied to a tree branch, then realizing we are a director filming an animal trainer train a crow, then realizing we are watching a director train an animal trainer to train his crow, and finally realizing we are our ordinary selves and the crow is gone and there is only one man training another man, and we feel for the other man like we first felt for that crow. When the human gets the directions from his trainer wrong here, we think, we love that human's nature as much as we love that animal's nature (Guy Ben-Ner's "Second Nature").

The further we wade into shifting perspectives, appropriation and increasing instincts towards empathy, the more likely it is that we’ll get things amazingly wrong. We are sometimes warned away from an empathy that extends beyond the loyalty of our families and communities and radiates to foreign communities and onward towards animal kingdoms and plant kingdoms – and we are sometimes encouraged towards it. In any case, moving towards empathy and moving away from it is the thing that makes us most human.

And, in any case, I am bound to get a family member’s feelings as wrong as I would a dolphin’s, but that doesn’t mean that I should stop trying.

We didn’t stay for long in the Cinesphere (because we promised the attendants that we wouldn’t) but from my limited time and specific perspective, I think “Wild Ocean” was about freedom.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) - directed by and starring Melvin Van Peebles

2010-07-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

(I had rented Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Twilight #2 at the video store. My friend Carl Wilson called just as Twilight #2 ended to see if I wanted to watch a movie. So Carl and I watched Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Neither of us had seen it before. We asked each other a lot of questions about the plot throughout the movie. If you get the DVD, don’t miss “The Making of…” documentary. Melvin Van Peebles is a pretty easy man to listen to. )

A young black orphan is taken in by a lot of black women in an arty brothel… or a sexy art performance space. The young orphan quickly becomes a man and is then named Sweetback – I think because he is such a good lover. Sweetback doesn’t talk much… or at all. He is a good performer and is also very passive. The arty space looks oddly familiar to me – as though this movie wasn’t made that long ago or made from that far away.

Some white cops enter and watch the end of a performance that Sweetback is part of – they watch from a distance. They are digging it – everyone is. The show is about a dyke’s dream of becoming a man. Two women, one in drag with a beard and a dildo, and one with bride of Frankenstein hair, perform a loving courtship in the middle of the space’s red-carpeted room. The audience, seated on chairs, circles them intimately. A tall man, in a pale blue fairy godmother gown, tells us that even dykes have dreams. With some distraction tricks and lighting effects, the dyke’s dream comes true and the woman in drag becomes Sweetback the man, with a real beard and a real penis. The loving courtship is then consummated.

After the show, the cops ask the boss of the space, Beetle, if Beetle can give them “one of his boys” for them to take downtown. On account of a recent murder, the cops want to bring in some suspects so they look good to their superiors. We’ll bring him right back, they say. In exchange, the cops offer continued good relations and a bit of dope. Beetle considers, then suddenly sees the camera and glares at the camera’s intrusion – or glares at whoever the camera is supposed to be.

Sweetback is so well-liked by everyone that when the cops take him to an abandoned field (with another “suspect” they pick up) Sweetback is freed of his handcuffs by one of the cops. “Oh sorry about that Sweetback” the cops says to Sweetback, noticing eventually that Sweetback is getting jerked around as they hit the man who does not yet “look like a sniper” whom Sweetback is handcuffed to. The cop frees Sweetback and then returns to beating the other man. Sweetback looks out to the distance for a while and, after an incredibly long moment, eventually turns and hits both the cops with his half open handcuffs. Everything is stilled, the movie framing only Sweetback as the only man standing. After another moment, Sweetback returns to beating the cops at his feet. After this, hell breaks loose.

The black community is internally torn by Sweetback’s actions and is also turned upside down while cops look for Sweetback. People are angry at Sweetback for causing all this trouble, but excited, too, that Sweetback is still alive. The longer Sweetback escapes the reach of the cops, the more excited people get. During this time, there is some self-protective love-making that Sweetback engages in with ex-girlfriends, racist bikers and non-communicative hippies.

Also during this time, a lot of conversations take place - between Sweetback and people offering to help Sweetback, between Sweetback and people who are not offering to help Sweetback, conversations between the cops and the press, the cops and the cops, between the religious minister and the people, the religious minister and Sweetback - between the cops and Sweetback’s friends. During most of these conversations, the talkers talk right into the camera, the camera standing in for the “listener” or for Sweetback - since Sweetback is most often the one being talked at. It creates the effect of feeling, as a member of the movie audience, that you are in the position of the person who is being talked at. The movie could have been called “Things People Have Said To Me (Sweetback) and To You!”

The effect works so effortlessly within the traditionally structured narrative that I didn’t even notice it at first. It’s pretty impressive to stretch the rules of a traditional narrative to include the audience in this way without actually breaking the narrative. It is especially impressive when the effect is both subtle and effective, where the silence of the main character most clearly mimics the silence of an audience.

It also works to create empathy for almost all of the characters – for the audience to be put in this position of being yelled at, or turned away, or treated as a villain or an insider or as a friend.

It is not the most obvious choice to make a movie about a revolution where the main revolutionary never speaks, but it sure makes for a sound revolution. "Run Sweetback, Run!" the band Earth, Wind & Fire sing/ scream at Sweetback over and over again from the musical score as Sweetback makes his way out of the city, across the fields and into the desert. If Sweetback saves himself and makes it to Mexico, he might one day return.

Backyard (1984) – directed by Ross McElwee, starring Ross McElwee and Dr. Ross McElwee

2010-07-06T08:27:00.001-07:00

(I had the south on my brain – I felt like sitting in the south, outside, for a bit. I thought of Ross McElwee, who made the pretty great “Sherman’s March”. I poked around the library and found another movie of his whose title also refers to a specific location in the south, “Backyard”. )

Ross McElwee, returning from a northern college, is back at the family home in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has brought his moving picture camera with him.

The movie begins with a still picture of the Ross McElwee, who is the director of “Backyard”, and his father, Dr. Ross McElwee. The doctor is wearing a pale southern suit and has graying hair. Ross is wearing running shoes and has a beard. They look good and kind of like the same white man playing two very different parts. Ross is holding his camera in the picture. He’s holding it like some people, in still pictures, hold a fish or a gun or a baby – like an important piece of information. The two men are, ever so slightly, leaning away from each other.

Over the still image, Ross tells us that his father disapproves of his career path - a career path that involves that moving image camera. I think about the doctor sending his son off to college in the north and then the son returns with a camera - a camera that is, for the most part, pointed directly at the doctor’s face. It is hard to match up values sometimes.

After the still photos, we move in real time around the house, the backyard, the country club, the hospital. Ross films himself and other people who work or reside around these places. There are banal activities, racism, celebrations, rides on golf carts and work. There is not much talking or explaining so we mostly get to know people by what they do.

The doctor goes to work a lot. At work, he cuts into people’s bodies and fixes their organs. It is hard to argue against the value of that career. When the doctor comes home, he sees his son sitting in a chair filming his backyard.

There is the African American couple, the Staffords. Lucille Stafford cooks and cleans for the McElwees and Melvin Stafford takes care out their backyard. We see them working more than the doctor works since “the backyard” is where they work. The Staffords seem more comfortable being filmed that the young white people who periodically show up in he frame, whose working lives are not shown but who often request sandwiches. I think they are students.

There is a neighbour seated on a chair in a thicket behind a fence. He is wearing a suit. His self-appointed job is to keep himself hidden and his eyes on a house in the distance. He is anticipating a mid-day break-in. There have been a few break-ins around the affluent neighborhood in the backyard and he thinks he might catch the criminals if he waits. His job is the one that, technically, most resembles Ross’s job.

It is not an easy day in the south, but it is intimate and complicated and quiet and interesting. All of these good things were established right away in the first moving image scene of the movie. In this scene, Ross films himself, alone, playing the family piano. The piano is out of tune and Ross plays it kind of badly. It is not like he has his tongue sticking while he tries to make an ugly face - it is him trying to be good and failing. It's pleasurable and even strangely soothing to watch him play with sincerity and mistakes and without frustration. It is not an apologetic scene - just one with a lot of information about Ross and maybe of what is to follow. If there is bad behavior or human mistakes caught with his moving picture camera, it will not be too surprising if some of them are his.

Robin Hood (2010) - directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe

2010-06-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

(My friend Lauren Bride invited me to the movies. She suggested “Robin Hood” or “Babies.” We decided on “Robin Hood” because it was summertime. At the theatre, when I saw Russell Crowe’s head on the poster, I was a little disappointed. He always plays the mightiest of virtuous white men, sort of like Doris Day but not as funny and more prone to unwanted and overly serious advice giving. I might have picked “Babies” had I known. How could such a can’t-play-anything-but-a-virtuous-man play Robin Hood? I also somehow made the mistake of picturing the time period being 1990s, and the stage, Hollywood - the time of Kevin Costner and well-laundered cloaks. So I was a little startled when the movie opened in the deep past. I think probably no one else was startled. Throughout the movie, Lauren and I whispered jokes to each other. When we walked home, we didn’t mention the movie. We talked about other things.)

I had no thoughts about this movie – other than an attempt at historical accuracy and a grittier aesthetic doesn't add much to this big story that keeps collectively getting better (this movie excepted) 600 years after its origin. Also, it's a war movie (?) starring a virtuous and victorious Russell Crowe (?).

But a month later, on an airplane, after reading an article on perceptual illusions, I fell asleep and had a dream that David Foster Wallace and Russell Crowe were on a panel together. Russell Crowe had his Robin Hood outfit on and his hat in his hands. He looked nervous. He had lost some weight and was finally sweating in all the wrong places. He kept looking at David Foster Wallace, and then, back at the audience. David Foster Wallace was relaxed and in jeans, looking out into the seated crowd. Neither of them were talking. The less they talked, the more nervous Russell Crowe got. Russell Crowe wanted to defend himself, to tell people he was a virtuous and good man, but no one was asking any questions. We all just sat there. It was different from that time I saw Russell Crowe on Oprah, when he gave her a book for her Oprah’s book club, “The Magus”.

If you really want to steal from the rich and give to the poor, it's good to remember that your trial probably won’t come for a long time - if ever. You'll have to be patient with being misunderstood, even by people you love. You may be glorified for the wrong reasons and disrespected at all the right parties. Understanding someone can take a very long time.

But it can be interesting to be misunderstood, and being misunderstood lets you be more flexible. Flexibility is important if you want to be an effective element in the big story rather than the respected author of your own story. It can be really fun to see how much one can affect the big story, becoming any character that proves most useful. And fun to observe what story we all begin to understand collectively.

When I woke up from my David Foster Wallace / Russell Crowe dream, there were a lot of people in line for the airplane washroom in the back and no one in line for the one in first class. A stewardess sent me back when I attempted to go to the one in first class, rolling her eyes at this move that had been tried a million times before. Sometimes it's harder to change the big story than to be a hero of your own making.

The Elephant in the Living Room (2010) - by Michael Webber, starring Terry Brumfield and Tim Harrison

2010-06-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

(The closest cinema to where I'm staying in San Francisco is called Roxie Theater. Roxie Theater was playing a movie I hadn't heard of: "The Elephant in the Living Room." I looked around but it seemed like all the other nearby cinemas were playing movies for kids. I thought: maybe June is when kids watch movies. So I went around the corner and bought a ticket. It was being presented by the United Film Festival as part of their "Animal Rights" program. The director of the festival and the director of “The Elephant in the Living Room” sat down in the narrow line of blue seats with the audience when the movie began. )

The narrative of "The Elephant in the Living Room" is sort of: “There is a lion in my backyard - and it is getting bigger!” It focuses on people who keep animals like pythons and tigers in their homes, and what happens when the pythons and tigers grow larger than the people. Sometimes the people dump the animals in the suburban wilds. Sometimes they keep them.

We mostly see Ohio. We mostly look at two characters: The Man with a lion, and The Officer from the state. The Man, a big soft spoken one who looks a bit like his lion, was given the baby lion when he had a broken back and depression. He says the love helped him to survive. But then the baby lion grew up and became a big lion in a small cage. And then they were stuck there, the lion in the cage and The Man who made the cage.

The Officer, with the mustache and the baseball cap, is sincerely hoping to untangle the love/cage problem for the lion and The Man - and for Ohio. He is brave and kind and he is good at his job. He really wants to do the right thing. He catches cougars found in peoples' backyards. He tries to find better places for them. He buys the most poisonous snake at the Underground Snake Convention so that no one else buys it. But snakes make a lot of babies and he cannot buy all of them. The Officer is exhausted. Cases like these have just been increasing every year since the mid 90s and he doesn't know why. (My theory - that monkey on "Friends" is to blame).

The Officer doesn't see an end to the problem. The few exotic animal santuaries in America are mostly over capacity. He is starting to question his role and what side he is on. We see a pleasing shock in his eyes when a new idea occurs to him - maybe, he thinks, he should not try to capture the dangerous animals in the suburban wilds. Maybe he should let them run free.

I thought of the movie The Matrix Reloaded (Matrix #2) - the humans being kept in cages by computers and the growing number of humans who escape, then are hunted down by the computers. I had recently picked it out of a sale bin at Walgreens. The bin was under a helium balloon that said “Papa Navedaz!"

The Matrix2 doesn't work so well. I think it is because everything started off with too much value. When everything has equal value, it's hard to know what to focus on. Like, here are the proper names in the movie: The One, The Architect, The Key-maker, Zion, Trinity, Morpheus, Persephone, The Oracle. That is a lot of value! Midway through, I had a real longing for some garbage – or at least a mortal. I wanted The Farter, The Fuck up, The Mistake, The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly.

You have to be a real magician to take only value and double it. Sometimes it is easier to make a movie that begins with lowlier proper nouns and then move them towards value. "The Elephant in the Living Room" starts in the middle of nowhere and moves towards value. Apart from some seriously problematic music choices, the movie is funny and sweet and occasionally brushes against epic. It is really interesting to see men working together to solve the old love/cage problem as though it is a new problem. Since we are only starting from Ohio and not from the olden times, it looks kind of like a problem that men have only just discovered. It is as though, from this perspective, we are watching a mass male entry into the nurturing arts and its complications. They are beginning with snakes and tarantulas. It's a hard-won pleasure to catch a glimpse of The Man's heart of gold or see that The Officer may in fact be "The One". And it is a surprise when we can see the vague but convincing outlines of a possible apocalyptic scenario (where these animals first take over the suburban wilds and then, all of America) - originating in Ohio! At least more surprising than seeing one originate in place called Zion.

For a good apocalyptic movie scenario, you really need at least a few elements without so much consistent value . The good ones are like a magnifying glass on the thriving life, boredom and absurdity of a regular day. To our delight or pain, we watch as things randomly, and with great speed, move in and out of meaning, value and existence. It is like a bird lands on your shoulder just as the convenience store goes up in flames - you don't know what the fuck is going on, but you know something is happening. Our human brains lag behind the action, working hard to make meaning from the chaos. It is what we do best.

Whatever Works (2009) - written & directed by Woody Allen, starring Larry David

2010-06-12T00:08:00.001-07:00

(I had run out of Woody Allen movies to watch. As far as I could see, there was one left, there on the video store shelf, “Whatever Works”. It didn't look good: the prematurely balding Larry David in a “what can you do?” shrug on the cover. Not a trace of pleasure on his face. I had vague memories that a pretty teenager-woman who looks off into outer space was also involved. All one can really think when contemplating the box without much information is, “Please, Woody Allen, please don’t let this movie be about how that man who has a facial expression kind of like yours ends up having sex with a late teenager even though he is initially unwilling.” This is not the kind of story that reliably gets better the more you tell it. The DVD case looked as desirable as a half smoked cigarette on the sidewalk. I picked it up. And when I walked home with it under my arm, confident of a little bit of pleasure, I thought - how bad could it be?)

One might put the Larry David doll next to Woody Allen doll on the shelf, if one was trying to clean up and organize one's collectibles – even though the Woody Allen doll was made with plastic and hand-sewn doll clothes in 1977 and the Larry David doll was made with rubber in 2009. But it turns out that if you put the Larry David man in a Woody Allen movie, it is very hard not to pay attention to their flaming differences.

As someone said - don’t judge the performer, judge the performance. But if I judge the Larry David performance in this Woody Allen movie, everyone loses. If I judge the performer, Larry David, then Larry David wins. Who knew? When Larry David is playing Woody Allen, he plays a physicist genius who is wise to (through his superior intellect) the meaninglessness of the human condition - as though, in the 21st century, only a genius (and a physicist??) could entertain a vision of this nature. The meaninglessness that LD as WA has to contend with is epic and profound. He also fights with imbeciles, homophobes and religious fundamentalists. He does his best to cope.

The character's stance as enlightened-nihilist-filled-with-despair seems like it's from another time, like, another time from a long time ago, especially in forced comparison to the Larry David who created Seinfield and Curb Your Enthusiasm, a man who gleefully pours sugar on his meaningless breakfast cereal and rubs his hands together with delight before digging in. When LD is the LD character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he fights with children, kindly doctors and Ted Danson – all of whom are a little bit smarter and more morally developed than old LD. It is the others who do their best to cope with him while he dances to escape their frustrated clutches and exasperated glares. LD as LD passionately takes up positions on matters of the pettiest nature. His joy in this endeavor cannot be hidden and his pleasure at playing the villain is transparent. Seeing Larry David play the Woody Allen character reminds one that the Woody Allen character is always the hero, no matter how flawed.

Man-impressions aside, the most damning problem regards the old fourth wall. In the opening sequence the LD as WA points out the camera to his dumber-than-him friends and talks about the viewers at home watching them. Of course, no one else can see the camera except for this genius. Now, playing the (now simple) breaking-the-fourth-wall game with LD can make a director look pretty silly. Maybe WA talked directly to the camera while inside a fictional narrative while LD was in diapers (or at least.. um, in business school) but somewhere around 2009, on the set of Curb Your Enthusiasm, near the end of the season, LD as LD strolled past the forth wall and the fifth while whistling a bad tune and waving at Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol didn't wave back. Larry David kept smiling.

Maybe if LD walked around talking about what a genius he was, he wouldn’t have run into a problem like being in this movie and making Woody Allen look bad.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) - directed by Tony Richardson, based on a story by Alan Sillitoe

2010-05-25T07:26:00.000-07:00

( I was thinking recently about people's different motivations for working so hard at what they do. I suddenly wanted to watch a sports movie. I asked my boyfriend’s mother, Susan Glouberman - a psychoanalyst who shares some of my movie tastes, if "Chariots of Fire" was worth seeing. She said no, but that "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" might be worth seeing. Most things “worth seeing” fall out of my mind pretty quickly but the words "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" proved to pulse in the brain like a Jenny Holzer truism repeating across Times Square - right up until I landed at the video store. I asked the video store employees if they had it. I explained that I didn’t know what kind of movie it was, who made it, or in what country, so I wasn’t sure where to look. They said it was a “Kitchen Sink drama”. And I said, oh, ok. I immediately pictured someone eating their dinner over the kitchen sink because life is urgent and not easy and maybe because there is no kitchen table - but that there is value in "drama". These thoughts took me to the U.K. before I knew that we were there. )

Angry boy's working class father dies. His mother’s boyfriend moves in shortly after. The family receives a $500 pension from father’s no-good employer. The mother is briefly lifted from her own anger and hardship and buys new things for everyone. The angry boy secretly burns his share of the money out of loyalty?anger?disgust?. He engages in petty theft as a leisure activity and, later, he steals money from a bakery. He is caught and sent to a progressive boys' reform prison run by an upper class benevolent father figure. The angry boy shows some talent in long distance running. The benevolent father figure encourages the angry boy, tells the angry boy that maybe with the help of his talent and a little hard work, he could lift himself out of his current position in life. We are led to believe that the angry boy excels at running because of where he comes from - his genius has its origins in a family that has always had to run away from the people who run things.

The movie leads to the climax which is the beginning of a long distance race between the boys from the reform school and a group of private school boys. Right before the race, there is a pleasurable scene with the upper class jock kids on one side of a change room and the working class delinquents on the other. The upper class kids are polite and soft spoken, the working class kids rambunctious and charming. It is like seeing boys and girls meet for the first time on the dance floor after being separated by their different schools - charged and excited, filled with prejudice and curiosity.

As the race began, I wondered if the angry boy would win or lose. I thought about what needed to happen for the movie and it wasn't obvious to me. Because it is a long distance race, there is plenty of time before we know what makes this movie "worth seeing". What happens with this time is stylistically similar to the potential-suicide scene in "It’s a Wonderful Life" when Jimmy Stewart is standing on the bridge in the snow, trying to decide if he should kill himself or not. They both involve collaged bits of dialogue, from the first parts of the movies, over a man's pained face.

Some of this collaged movie-memory-dialogue in "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" slows the angry boy down - some of it make him race ahead, leading the pack. You start to understand that it is not as though these movie-memory-dialogues are encouraging or discouraging - it is that, like Jimmy Stewart, he is making a decision. He is deciding if he should win or not. When we see this, we also remember how hard the decision is.

Sometimes, it is not good to win because "winning" implies you are partaking in someone else's game. Sometimes it is hard to leave the people you know behind and it is also hard to admit value to things that have been denied to you in the "loser" phase. Sometimes you are not fooled by the side of winning and its promised rewards, even while you are not fooled by the downsides of the world you are coming from. Sometimes it is really hard to win, even if you can.

Too bad for him, he has too much time to think.

Birdemic (2008) - written, directed and produced by James Nguyen

2010-05-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

(My friend Amy C Lam sent me a link to a download of this movie. She was in The Netherlands when she sent it but I don’t know if that has anything to do with it. She said it was made with ten thousand dollars and was “all kinds of reality”. I watched about ten minutes on my computer, then downloaded it to my television where I watched the whole thing. I fast-forwarded through some of the initial driving scenes out of impatience. I fast-forwarded the Karaoke-esque dancing scene, and the making-out in their underwear scene out of discomfort. Once the digital and angry American eagles came, I didn’t fast-forward anything.)

Ok, so you only have ten thousand dollars and you’re going to make a movie. One way to go is the “Incredibly Resourceful and Innovative” route. Like, there’s Jean Cocteau’s "Orpheus" that employs a lot of Parisian eye trickery, the kind of no-money-lots-of-art special effects that convincingly show a lady from the "other side" walking out of a mirror (that's actually a pool) and Orpheus walking out of hell (hell being the film projection of an earlier take).

Another way to go is the “Think Big, Pay Very Little” method, acquiring absolutely all the things that a high budget movie has, but just have them be very low quality. If you go with this method, you might as well go all out and use one of the best movies of all time – like Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as a cinematic starting point (and point of comparison), and throw in a strong environmentalist message.

This is what that looks like:

There is a brown haired man. He is a bit stiff and can’t dance. We think maybe he is popular but not conceited, but for sure he doesn’t think only about sex like some men. He was in computer software developing, but then turned to sales. Today, he made his biggest sale. It was for one million dollars. He is feeling good. On the street he runs into a blond fashion model. They went to high school together but she doesn’t remember. She has to go – she is on her way to a fashion model audition. It looks like they’re in a really small town, so we wonder what kind of audition this is, but maybe they are in Los Angeles. She is a fashion model, but her mother would like her to have a back-up plan, like real-estate agent. The brunette and the blond go on a date. The date is like being at a wedding and listening to a small town fashion model and computer software salesman talk about what they want out of life. Sometimes we can see how interesting they are to each other because it is like the entire background is blurred out and the only sharp thing is them. The brunette goes back to work and thinks about how to do innovative green business. The brunette then goes home and buys solar panels for his house for nineteen thousand dollars. It turns out the blond’s best friend and the brunette’s best friend are also dating. No one is surprised by this, after all, it is a small world. They all go on a double date. For the double date they see “An Inconvenient Truth”. The best-friend couple have sex afterwards. They are always having sex. The brunette is introduced to the blond's mother. It is like we are at that wedding again. Then, there is another date, this one is out of town at the Art & Pumpkin Festival. It turns out that the brunette is not only interested in the blond’s looks and that the blond is not only interested in the brunette’s money. This is where we watch the man and the woman make out in their underpants.

After that happens, digital eagles start banging against their motel window. The blond and brunette wait there till it stops. Then they run to another motel room next to theirs where another man and woman stand. The tall man in this room happens to be wearing army fatigue pants and has a machine gun. The women smile friendly at each other. The brunette explains that they need help getting out of there cause the eagles are crazy and he can’t find his car keys. They all leave together in a van. After that, it gets interesting.

For example:
“I couldn’t handle fighting in Iraq anymore. Why can’t we just give peace a chance?”
“I have to go now, it sounds like a mountain lion is coming. You should go too”
“Are you saying global warming is causing the eagles to go crazy?” A: “I’m a scientist, I can’t speculate but.. (7 minute speech)…”.

I don’t know what was happening in the head of the person who made this. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be funny or if it’s supposed to be serious... or what. But besides my inability to comprehend the intentions of the director, and besides the fact that it’s kind of a horror movie, Birdemic somehow made me feel good. It’s also very relaxing, especially when the angry birds come. It’s a rare example of how the “Think Big, Pay Very Little” method can really make you contemplate why people make things. And that sometimes that method can even create meaning and give you a whole new kind of feeling.

The intentions of a director and the specific creative context of a movie's production have always been hard to puzzle out. And now, with the increasing accessibility of movie-making tools, the increasing plethora of moving images, and the ever multiplying moving-image-viewing-stations, it makes the "identifying a director's intentions and creative context game" a harder game to win. Seeing value or meaning in anything is sometimes rare – sometimes that is good enough.

If this movie was presented at a museum it should be looped on four different screens all playing at different stages of the movie. There, I think an audience would, for the most part, be drawn to contemplating the nature of what acting is, why people makes things, what normal is, what it means to be part of "reality", and the challenges and rewards of bringing politics into “entertainment”.

At Five in the Afternoon (2003) - written and directed by Samira Makhmalbaf

2010-05-06T06:47:00.001-07:00

(I watched Samira Makhmalbaf’s third feature length movie at home recently on my breaking-down television. Samira Makhmalbaf’s first feature, “The Apple”, is one of my favourites. It's set in Iran and is about twin sisters who are physically let out of the locked gate of their home for the first time in their eleven years by a calm and persistent social worker. The girls roam around the neighbourhood together like delighted aliens. The father who had kept them behind the gate is shown simply as a religious man with a blind wife who was doing what he thought was best. “At Five in the Afternoon” also involves two female characters who live with a religious father figure. The father here is also simply doing what he thinks is best. He is an old man and the girls are women. The father, again, wants to protect them, but he is running out of locations - struggling to find a place for them all where “God still lives”. There is no gate – no house and the woman are not prisoners. They live as refugees moving from “ruins” to “ruins” with a horse drawn cart in a devastated Afghanistan. Like “The Apple”, it is an incredibly pleasurable movie.)

Apart from the chores of finding food, water and shelter, the main character Nogreh stands most frequently at a back doorway between a religious meeting place and a city street. She slips her sky blue burqa behind her head like a superhero cape and replaces her modest shoes with well worn high heels and heads off to a school she secretly attends with girls who have less strict fathers than hers. At her school, there are “elections” to see which girl should be “president”. Nogreh has entered the race. She spends a great deal of the movie asking others and herself how change can happen in her country, how a woman like her could become president. She wants to see the speeches that successful presidential candidates in other countries wrote – “the speeches that made people vote for them”. Her questions are searching and practical, she is starting from the beginning.

There is one scene where Nogreh descends down an outdoor staircase with her high heels, her sky blue cape and sun umbrella. Behind her are ruins where her father rests. She stops ten steps above a French soldier standing alone at the bottom of the ruins. Nogreh’s friend, Poet, bikes up and begins to act as translator. The French soldier is told by Poet that Nogreh is Afghanistan’s future president. The French soldier immediately brings his body to attention and salutes Nogreh with sincere respect.

I understand the soldier, I understand that if you are in a foreign country (or even in your own neighborhood), it is often hard to know what is what. It looks like the French solider is both prepared to understand this is a game and prepared to understand that this is true. How could he possibly know for sure? It is hard even for the girl, whose narrative this is, to know what is possible. But he responds with conviction and respect. The soldier and Nogreh have entered into a situation that is either a game or a new beginning - none of us are sure which.

When Shakespeare wrote "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players” in 1599, theatrical stages were in fewer numbers and in more collectively agreed upon locations than presently. Though teasing with “reality”, it was clearly a metaphor.

In 2010, the world is literally very often a stage – the stage part comes in and out of focus in random locations all around the world with the help of tiny video cameras and big, cheap ones. It is now more likely to be true that the sand box we are sitting in or the war zone we are negotiating can literally turn into a stage before you know it.

Shakespeare’s line is still an effective metaphor because though the world is often a stage, it is not always. And though sometimes we are pretending, we are not always. We know both things are possible, at the same time or alternatively, and depending on where one is standing. We can see the metaphor and/or the literal, the play fighting and/or the war, the posturing and/or the effective stabs at action.

There are some great movie makers who are smart about these co-existing perspectives: Agnes Varda, Charlie Kaufman, Ben Stiller with “Tropic Thunder". But Samira Makhmalbaf knows better than anyone how to make art while the world's random and occasionally painfully real theatrical stages coming in and out of focus. She is a genius at saying tangible and concrete things that shift freely between "the stage" and "the reality" - and at knowing how true to life this looks now.

Even woven into the heart of Samira Makhmalbaf's narrative is the hopeful and searching question - could these poetic metaphors of empowerment also be true? Her main character, Nogreh, asks herself: Am I playing or is this real? The answer, of course, is "Yes".

The Headless Woman (2008) - written and directed by Lucrecia Martel

2010-04-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

(I rented this at the video store down the street. It was near the cash and the title "The Headless Woman”, a title that ran over a silhouette of a woman’s head with a mass of bleached curls, always caught my eye. One would think that they wouldn’t show a head for the idea of a headless woman. But I am a bit heavy on the side of wanting my metaphors to be literal. And what other visual are they going to show? I ask myself. A toilet? A handbag? I am also always a little more inclined to select a movie if I think the movie is about a group structure or a system rather than an individual character. For instance, if the Dvd cover said “The Headless Women” and had a line drawing of a gold star on it, I probably would have rented it 7 months ago when I first saw it there. And if the image was a photographic image of a woman's whole face, it would have taken me longer.)

The Headless Woman involves groups of people in a community in Argentina. There are people who take care of teeth (upper class), people who take care of pets (upper class), people who take care of plants (lower class) and people who take care of people (lower class). There is much incest between the dentists and the veterinarians. Instead of a narrative about the winners and the losers of incest, here, the incest works to show the intimacy of one group living, thinking and breathing together. We don’t know very much about the people who take care of plants and people, but they are around and are part of this story.

Verónica, a dentist, is the main character. It is her bleached head of curls on the box cover. The only golden head in the movie. Early on, Verónica makes a careless mistake and runs over something while driving her car. It is unclear to us what she has run over. Though shaken and having hit her head, she doesn’t investigate or look back. A thunder storm begins and we continue to follow her for the rest of the movie.

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a novel that is still painfully effective in bringing one through the insanity of a "rational" murder, could have easily been called “The Man with Too Much of His Own Head”. Like many intelligent and impoverished university students, Raskolnikov (the man with too much of his own head) reasons out his own new moral constitution apart from the (often unreasonable) moral constitution of the society he lives in.

It becomes more crazy-making when his ideas are carried through in actions - actions taken within a society that doesn't know anything about his private new moral constitution. For instance, his collective society would have probably said it was ok to kill some young men ( in a war let's say) but it would probably have taken about a hundred years of argument for them to agree collectively that the world would be a better place if Raskolnikov killed the mean lady down the street. It is hard to remain sane while rigorously keeping up your mind's secret moral constitution. It is hard to be the only one around to argue over the validity of these new morals with yourself. Especially when the morals have already translated into actions.

The Headless Woman is the more common, but equally complicated, story of a murderer. Martel’s main character, Verónica, doesn’t need to maintain a rigorous understanding of her own morals because she is fairly trusting of the morals of her community. She barely needs her own head at all - though she starts out with such a seemingly unique one. Unlike Raskolnikov, Verónica becomes more sane after she murders someone. She does not conceal her "mistake" to the dentists and veterinarians. She tells them. They listen, nod, and then, with their collective constitution and societal power, act immediately and discreetly in her favour. The Headless Woman is a machine.

It is not a simple movie. We are given Verónica to empathize with, and empathize we do. We know how easy it is to become a villain like this. We just sometimes forget how horrible this machine can be when it moves along so effortlessly.

The English title Crime and Punishment is supposedly a poor translation of the Russian "transgression over a border". As Crime and Punishment unfolds, Raskolnikov transgresses well past the collective moral boundaries of his society. He stands outside - alone, disturbed and disturbing.

In The Headless Woman, Verónica starts out with uniquely bleached blond hair among a sea of rich brown hair. Near the end, maybe out of a new displeasure of standing alone or out of self-protection (we are not sure), she dies her hair back to the standard rich brown of her community. She moves towards the centre of her society's collective moral constitution.

For the last scene of the movie, we watch Verónica’s brown hair and smiling face attend a dinner party with the dentists and veterinarians at an expensive restaurant. The song “Mammy Blue” plays and we hear no other words. Her brown hair and smiling face nestle in comfortably towards the center of the table- she is as far away from questioning the moral borders of her community as she can possibly be. She is right back in the center, safe and sound - barely indecipherable from anyone else in her community. Hers, and her community's, is a crime of banal and collective evil.

After seeing the movie, the cover image now makes me think of the children's horror story of murder, “Mr. Fox”. The story has stayed with me for years, but in a fragmented way. I had always remembered the main refrain “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold or your head will turn to gold” as a young woman kept opening doors that were not to be opened. I just looked it up and I'm completely wrong. The main refrain is “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.” In either case, I guess one should be careful about getting too far away from the borders of your society - whatever direction you may be headed.

Hancock (2008) – written by Vincent Ngo, directed by Peter Berg, starring Will Smith

2010-04-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

(It was raining all day and I watched this at home on my TV. My favourite kind of expensive movie involves science fiction fastened to contemporary reality. Though it only received 42 % approval rating on the Tomatometer, that's a number that often works well for me. I always figure that means politics were involved and split the vote. I figured I would like it and I did. After I finished watching it, I watched the good parts again.)

This 2008 movie is a lot like the 1942 movie Casablanca. It focuses on practical altruism and consists of a drunk hero, an angel hero and a good man hero. These characters are compelled towards each other and towards good works. In both centuries, the drunk is upset with the angel for letting him believe for so long that he was alone in the world.

Instead of being in opposition to the Nazis etc., the Hancock characters are in opposition to plain old criminals, to devastating loss in people's private lives, and to the banal evils of pharmaceutical companies. None of these heroes are very interested in public appreciation and all of them are generous in giving the criminals/ outsiders/ pharmaceutical companies a healthy benefit of the doubt before they let their pride or righteousness have a go. The forces of opposition are barely a threat to these super strong characters; so the characters themselves, satisfyingly, become the main force of action and their own worst enemies – struggles among the gods. They are also the primary joke tellers.

In Casablanca, the only way the drunk can become worthy of the angel's love again is to send her away on a plane with the good man while he, the drunk, remains on the ground in the fog. The angel’s love will help the good man make the world a better place. It is a resonating paradox conceived by the sobered drunk to the shock but silent admiration of the angel and to the oblivion but safety of the good man.

Luckily, Hancock is 21st century science fiction and is not so romantic. Here, actions are transparent and choices are made in consensus. The drunk doesn’t send the angel away, the drunk and the angel move away from each other because it turns out they are physically weaker together – less useful and more prone to injury. (We all sort of understand that an angel and a drunk are enormously more of a pain in the ass than an angel and a good man.) It is less of a sacrifice of one’s destiny for the greater good than a reasonable choice for one's own health and happiness. Here, destiny is something that goes on and on and is as predictable as gravity; the choices made against it become the small mysteries. In Hancock, the intimacy of friendship between three people is as compelling and as full of depth as Casablanca's private romantic love between two people.

In Hancock, the good man (who is a public relations man) helps the drunk (who is a superhero) improve his low-on-public-approval image to the city. This accomplishment is achieved early on in the movie. Though this change has useful benefits, for instance the drunk is less of an overt asshole to the people whose lives he is saving and he is also breaking less stuff, it becomes obvious that this is not the main point of the movie. It's pretty obvious from the beginning that he is generally a good person who is just having a hard time in his very long life . We see that the change in public perception doesn't change his heart at all.

That's the thing about being an altruistic asshole - you don't worry so much when your path doesn't correspond to public approval ratings and it doesn't move you so much when it does. We see a group of civilians around the drunk, applauding him for the first time in years after he saves several lives in a bank robbery (a typical act for him) while simultaneously not offending the victims, the police or the public (the new part). He tries to smile in gratitude to the applause, to be decent, but his looks like a smile of an alien trying to blend in on its second day on earth, the inevetiable and unintentional mockery of the human smile. Sometimes a disinterest in public approval is for the best and sometimes it's for the worst, it's always hard to know when to listen and when not to. But it is probably always for the best to try to not break so much stuff along the way.

It's pretty interesting to watch a character in a Hollywood movie undergo the most typical Hollywood character transition, only for us to then be shown how shallow that transition is for the character. But we are just at the halfway point here, we are just getting started. It turns out that it's very moving to see a character like that, this drunk, go after something deeper.

I-Be AREA (2007) - by Ryan Trecartin

2010-03-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

( I first saw Ryan Trecartin's I-Be AREA in 2007, with my friends Sheila Heti and Martha Sharpe, projected on a large wall in a small gallery. We began watching half way through and then watched the beginning last. It was one of the best things I had seen in a long time. I had also seen slightly earlier work of his before 2007 on Youtube and a few other places. The curators Jon Davies, who has screened Trecartin's videos here in Toronto before, and Helena Reckitt recently initiated a show of Trecartin's work that opens this week at The Power Plant contemporary art gallery. I watched I-Be Area again from start to finish on ubuweb a few nights ago on a computer in my studio. I wanted to watch it again before I saw the new work.)

I-Be AREA makes it look like addressing the most difficult of difficult-to-address-subjects is easy and fun: persona, authenticity, the neediness one can have for people who know you (mothers), the rebellion against people who think they know you (mothers), personality as a constant audition, the importance of production companies, etc. There are buildings and cornfields and living rooms and bedrooms. And every place is a performance space connected to other spaces through cameras and cell phones (or hands in the shape of cell phones). There is a collective of mothers, who have a preference for girl children and adoption. They run a bead store.

Here, the characters' bodies know the value of art in the age of reproduction. You don’t even need to take a picture, or stack Campbell's soup cans; you just have to repeat your own words immediately after you say them in order to make something that feels as special as a copy. No one is a bad actor because, here, life is a performance so how could anyone go wrong? The words (written by Trecartin) are full of jokes and a strange kind of clarity. The movie is somewhere between narrative poetry and an intense art experience. I will paste some of the words here since we are in a word medium right now.

PASTA: I’m in pain, serious pain. Charity, when I was your age, basically, I don’t like your name.
CHARITY: WHAT?!
AMANDA: I like the name Charity.
SEN-TEEN: Ok whatever AmanDUH
PASTA: and I understand this, I do. I changed my name from Uri Anderson Sommerset to Pasta when I was your age. And it was the best decision of my life. I think you need to think about this. This was way back at the end of the millennium.
SEN-TEEN: (pointing at Pasta) you should look up to this person.
PASTA: and not just because your short
CHARITY: whatever.

I-Be AREA might be hard to take for some people at first viewing; though it is generously narrative and incredibly entertaining for an art movie, the multi-coloured high speed spectrum whirling on screen can feel like one is choking on art because IT IS SO MUCH ART. But inside the jittering play group, there are laws and order and trials and battles and meaning and searches for meaning.

Parent: Laurie, you have a look on your face, tell me what the words are.

The main stage of I-Be AREA is the present. The present can be weird and fascinating. The present often makes people nervous and sometimes it takes a while to figure out how to talk about the new structures found there. For instance we all know that, with the help of new technologies, people now both have an amazingly increased capacity to adopt or develop new identities but also have a hugely increased burden of having the banal, shameful or glorious evidence of their pasts linger within these technologies.

No matter how old or young, we all have this problem-blessing of increased self-awareness, a problem-blessing that increases in intensity for each new generation year. We don’t just have tall tales about our shameful pasts, we have growing piles of hard evidence. We can’t roam around North America like the burdenless psychopathic families of the 90s, always in a new city with nearly a blank past. If we want to change, we have to change publicly – in front of our constructed families and in front of our anonymous audiences of 2 or more.

In I-Be AREA, adopting a new identity is as easy as pushing a button; but transitioning into this new person can be an incredibly vulnerable process - people have to change in front of the mocking eyes of their old friends, paid employees and anonymous audiences. The word “poser” is used a lot in I-Be AREA. Poser still has a negative connotation but is contrasted with the more positive “Pose!” – the more positive side of the successfully affected identity.

I-BE: ok, listen, my second dilemma – the same as the first. Ok part 2. Ok look. I wrote a letter to my future self
JAMY: just cause your original is having a complete human change meltdown makeover
CHEETA: just cause your creativity don’t mean you have to memorize
JAMY: yeah poser, play yourself a full side
I-BE: it’s called a clean slate, Jamy, Cheeta.
CHEETA: I-Be, I don’t understand how this is supposed to represent a minimal situation (holding a piece of blank paper)
CHEETA: I-Be
I-BE: put it in a bottle
I-BE: 30 years from now, when I’m walking on the beach and a perfect wave comes and hits me in the face with my bottle, and I open this letter back up – I want to see nothing. I want to look back on this like I’d just been born. (WISTFULLY)
JAMY: yeah.. I see a face in it (looking at the paper)
CHEETA: 30 years from now when you’re sitting on the beach, you’re going to looking at this dude’s face.
I-BE: well.. today is the day that I’m going to start over.
JAMY: you’re such a wasteful production man I-Be
CHEETA: yeah, you’re always trying to make things sound more special, and digital and non linear than they are and it’s stupid. (Jamy nods)
I-BE: I’m a fucking clone you piece of shit head. You exists cause some fag got a pregnancy implant. I exist cause of “command V”, copy and paste some guys dna. OH! So I’m allowed to feel like a digital girl in my world…. I live in it! It’s mE!

The good news is there is no more hiding of change – so we all have a better understanding that it is a thing that humans have to do. The idea of an “original” that never changes or grows seems less ideal than puritanical - a little freakish and a lot oppressive. We also understand that combined with these new self-generated "I"s are the other "I" realities created by different people - people shooting our actions, writing our stories, taking our pictures. This makes for a lot of different “I’s” – some with meaning, some without. It is never so obvious which ones have meaning and it can be a little confusing when they run into each other.

CHEETA: I just watched the living room channel, I thought you were going to fuck some shit up
I-BE: what?
I-BE: I told you what I’d be like
JAMY: yeah I-BE you was like a puppy
I-BE: yup. I saw myself. But it was a lie. They was lying. You think I don’t know me, but I do
I-BE: look I think I just saw a highly advanced 3d text message of my future self giving me the middle finger. Now I’m going to fuck right back in his face.
JAMY: you’re totally paranoid.
I-BE: listen. I know what my original wants to look like, and I can’t believe he tried to reverse-physcho me into that person – I mean, he looks cool ..and I like him.. and I would probably be him… but I know that’s not my original and I know he’s somewhere laughing

This incredibly intense new combination of freedom from identity/ burden of identity can’t help but work itself out. People are brilliant at working things out for themselves, even young people.

And along with the increased self-awareness in an increased awareness of others. With this increased empathy, there is less of a need to run away. We are all here, even if we are brand new today.

MAYFLY: (petting a cat and holding a glass of wine) Oh my god she loves me! (referring to one of her twin daughters)
PASTA: (mournfully) of course she does Mayflie, she’s not an alien. They’re both not aliens, you give her shelter sometimes.

This is really good work, the kind of work that forms you a new memory that maybe art once gave hope to the children and was sometimes banned by a pope. It's the kind of work that illuminates the stunning present with a wildly dancing handheld flashlight.

JAMY: I just feel bad cause nothing he does makes sense.
CHEETA: nothing adds up
I-BE: have ya’ll been downstairs lately?
I-BE: it looked different
JAMY: yeah, it looked weird right?
I-BE: I think that they had a 70s filter on a very low percentage, cause it reminded me of all the memories that I hate from that decade
CHEETA: you wasn’t alive back then, I know
I-BE: I said memory Cheeta!
JAMY: it’s not a filter it’s called Linda, a hidden decade from the present.
I-BE: Listen, quit explaining shit to me to me Jamy, you think I don’t know about all the decades they be hiding. They must have slipped me some computer pills or some shit because I had no control
CHEETA: I-BE, I can’t translate your rants, what the hell you mean?
I-BE: buy my rosetta stone.

The Hurt Locker (2008) - directed by Kathryn Bigelow

2010-03-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

(I watched this when it first came out on DVD. I watched it alone on a Saturday. The movie is entertaining and is kind of about a “cowboy”. Half way through, I had to go meet a friend for a drink. I walked down the street to the bar with my cowboy boots on still to the beat of this rock n’ roll war movie. The next day, I watched the second half.)

“The Hurt Locker” is framed by an opening quote, "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." This is the worst part of the movie - this quote. War is much worse than a drug and much more complicated. I'm sure that the book that this quote comes from is a wonderfully complicated book. But here, framing this entire movie, it is too simple.

This quote would have been great in front of “Apocalypse Now” because clearly there are a lot of different kinds of drugs going on there (including a great deal of confusion-inducing non-addictive ones) so there it would have been a wide open statement, or in front of “Tin Cup” because that movie stars Kevin Costner and is about a golf war. But apart from the pleasure-drug thumping soundtrack of “The Hurt Locker”, this movie shows a complexity of human action way beyond the movements of cocaine.

Apart from this, it is a really good movie. Instead of high realism, it is like a storybook story about a person who lives some of the time in an astronaut-like bomb suit in the Iraq and some of the time with a grocery cart in a suburban neighborhood somewhere in America.

The person in the bomb suit, James, is not like the other bomb-defusers. The other bomb-defusers are more like bomb-detonators. Instead of advancing themselves, they advance a robot that can detonate a bomb with a controlled explosion while they stay at a safe distance. These bomb-detonators approach the bomb only if all else fails. The bad side of detonation is that the buildings and streets get blow up.

But our man James is on the ground - with all the bad things that being on the ground entails. He walks up to ticking bombs with a peculiar comfort and manually defuses the bombs with his bare hands. We see the great pleasure and rewards of being a master at a difficult skill. All this to the horror of his team who think of James as having a death wish that will bring them all closer to death.

Some people seem to have bodies that automatically react to or are drawn towards explosive situations. Rather than the idea of a noble or heroic brain in action, I think sometimes it can be more like an involuntary movement of one’s body. They jump into pools when they see a kid struggling before they notice that they still have a cigarette in their mouth, they put their bodies between people in a fight before their mind questions if this is a useful idea for anyone, they sometimes walk instinctively towards a ticking bomb. I think it is fair to say that people like this would probably find it more painful to hear about bomb explosions from the safety of their homes, over the radio, than to be physically present where the trouble is and allow their bodies to walk forward and react.

The smartest part of this movie is that it is made very clear that James struggles to understand why he is the way he is, why his body moves so effortlessly towards these deadly bombs. It is too bad that that quote understands – everything else about the movie suggests something much more complicated. Mainly what James knows for sure is that he is really good at defusing bombs and that there are a lot of bombs around him.

The hope that one is "doing good" with their actions can sometimes make for deeper trouble than the trouble made by thrills and testosterone - the uncynical belief that one is making the world a better place, that one is saving children, stopping fights, defusing bombs. I think it is one of the great contemporary fantasies of war - soldiers as bomb-defusers. We know really well the horribly intentioned war villains, but we don’t as often see the good intentions gone horribly wrong. Here, we see James’ good intentioned initiatives, his masterful abilities and his dangerous mistakes and we get to focus on these things in a clear and strangely gentle way.

But my favourite part of the movie came when our man’s bomb squad almost crosses friendly fire in the desert with an ambiguously dressed group of soldiers. As the camera gets closer (and the situation defuses), we noticed that the head soldier of this group is the movie star Ralph Fiennes. As he says hello to our man in his British accent, I assume that he is playing himself as a British movie star among a crew shooting a war movie inside a war movie. And I was, like, Yeah! Let’s go war-movie-reality-tv-realism-reversal! But it turned out they were just playing British soldiers.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) - Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino

2010-03-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

(Though Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" made it clear Tarintino was a master, I wasn’t so excited to see “Inglourious Basterds.” Somehow the advertisements for it seemed like they were trying to trick me into thinking that women were in the movie, and that I would be interested in it. After the high art of "Kill Bill", I thought that this would be more like one of his earlier movies - a break or something. Also, the main premise “violence done to the Nazis who deserve it” seemed like an easy and dumb premise for violence. But I went to see it with my artist friends Amy C Lam and Seth Scriver and my boyfriend Misha Glouberman at Toronto's Rainbow Cinemas on one of the last few days it was playing in the city. The Rainbow Cinemas are special, they are underground and cheap. The screening rooms are like private screening rooms you would find in the Hollywood Hills, but after the 3rd great depression - and maintained with love. Seth brought a giant bag of homemade popcorn. We sat together in a narrow row - the closet people to the screen.)

The whole of any movie is made up of many parts: the music choices, the budget, the reason for making the movie in the first place, the audience, the approach, etc. I always think of cynicism in people's work as an easy dismissal or a contempt for one or more of these parts - a lack of faith that all of these parts are valuable and interconnected (however mysterious or seemingly insignificant they may seem.) Even if some of the reasons behind their choices elude the movie-makers, the less cynical directors can speak to this, and not just offer rote or dishonest reasons for their choices.

So with this definition in mind, Tarantino has arrived at the tops of the uncynical director's platform. I believe he could give you all the reasons for his movie-making choices - even if some of those reasons are "because it was beautiful" or "because I could." His choices and his reasons seem at their ecstatic best here, and the movie is remarkable for it. "Inglourious Basterds" seems to come from a place of *crazy wisdom*. Someone who uses crazy wisdom (as defined by Wikipedia) is "someone who is adept at employing esoteric and seemingly unspiritual methods to awaken an aspirant's consciousness."

At a time when contemporary reality has become more fun to play with than fiction, Tarintino has used his crazy wisdom to make a thoroughly fictitious movie by effortlessly rearranging the reality of history.

And with his crazy wisdom, he even thought of us, the audience - this movie gets as close to participatory culture as Hollywood has ever gotten. At one point while my friends and I were sitting inside Rainbow Cinemas, we watched on the screen a small Parisian cinema filled with all of the highest ranking Nazis officers of the Third Reich laughing as they watched a propaganda film of a Nazi shooting Jews randomly from a bell tower. As they watched, they laughed, as they laughed, the cinema started to burn. As the cinema started to burn, we started to laugh from our Rainbow Cinemas. In Paris, in the burning cinema run by a young Jewish woman, the doors were locked and the highest ranking Nazis of the Third Reich tried to get out.

The beauty with cartoon violence is that you still get to use your logical brain while you are experiencing it. While we at the Rainbow Cinemas laughed, we knew we didn't want to be laughing - laughing exactly like the Nazis laughed at their film - but we knew that we were. We also knew that without us, this surreal loop of disgust and indifference for the death of others would not be completed. We were not being tricked, this was just the specific ride we were on. There is a difference between manipulating an audience and creating a game where the audience gets to play a role. What was happening never escaped us, and it was not meant to.

Plus, there are women in the movie.

Yayoi Kusama: I Love Me (2009) - Directed by Takako Matsumoto

2010-03-01T14:23:00.000-08:00

(I saw this in a theatre at the Jewish Community Center in Toronto. It was part of Reel Artists – a small festival of movies about artists. My artist friend Shary Boyle had invited me to go. We sat together on a small row of seats. When one person moved in their seat - everybody moved in their seats.)

The documentary follows Yayoi Kusama around for a few years. Most of the time, she seems to be 77. Kusama is a successful artist who lives in Japan. When the office of the Emperor of Japan called, they asked if she would prefer being described as an abstract artist or an avant-garde artist when she received the Emperor's award for her contributions to the world - she prefers avant-garde. As blogger Oh, Carlos. says of her work - “Installation art done right. Even the most art-tarded person could walk into one of her rooms and feel something.”

It wasn’t till I arrived at the community center that I remembered having torn out an image of hers from an art magazine a long time ago – an advertisement from an art show without the title of the individual work. At the time, I worked and lived alone in a bachelor apartment. I didn’t have so many art friends back then. I always hated having little pictures of any kind around when I worked, but this image was helpful somehow. I taped it up above my sink.

Takako Matsumoto, the director of "Yayoi Kusama: I Love Me," stood up before the screening and explained that critical reviews of Kusama's work focus too much on her mental health issues, and that she had worked to avoid that problem. Unfortunately, the movie that followed also avoided a rigorous investigation into the more nuanced successes of Kusama’s work.

Mainly, Matsumoto's documentary follows Kusama around watching her paint and listening to her talk about her success. I can understand how this happened, she is a really compelling person to watch (I could barely focus on anyone else’s face in the movie and it’s not just because of her multi-coloured wigs or her cold stare that warmly reminded me of my grandmother.)

So by default, this movie ends up being a casual study of narcissism. It reminded me of that old joke - “what came first? The 60s avant-garde or the narcissist?” Kusama does not attempt to cover up her own narcissism in any way so it was not uncomfortable to witness as she seems to get very little pleasure from anything else. Her self-championing and self-branding seem integral to the success she has received from the art world and are by no means unusual or out of place there.

Avant-garde art started out as an understanding that radically new or politically critical work was often misunderstood and rejected by established art institutions. So along with this concept were contempt for conformity, commercial success and suspicion of established art institutions - though things got complicated. Around the 60s and 70s, many self described avant-garde artists weren't as afraid of being in the museums (as they became more embraced by them) as they were of being derivative. Creating something wholly original in the world became a primary goal.

There is a hope within this form that an individual’s originality will create the next part of the solid line of art history or human history. In retrospect, it is hard not to see all these individual attempts at originality forming the small new branches on a tree rather than a solid time-based line pointing to the future. The younger generation of artists are still interested in creating something new, but I think that they are not as afraid of being a part of the world in order to do this. Hopefully that means that some of them will succeed in talking about the heart of the tree rather than reaching as far away from the trunk as possible.

And though Kusama shares this interest of being wholly unique (and profits from the critical and commercial success that being "wholly unique" now occasional provides), her work betrays a longing for the whole of the world and a longing to escape this rigorous individuality and its isolating narcissism. Her art often shows a space filled with a seemingly infinite number of repeated and harmoniously similar objects (occasionally referred to in her titles as “souls” or “fireflies".) It’s unusual to have images that allow you to think warmly and pleasurably of the infinite universe without including a fear of it. The effect is closer to a unity that is complicated and freeing rather than fascist. Maybe this is why she is still making work that looks so contemporary and not like the work from 40 years ago. New is still good right?

At one point while painting, Kusama talks about being surprised when she had first sold a painting for 1.6 million dollars. “Did that make you happy?” the documentarian asks from behind the camera. “Yes, it was nice” Kusama responds, “It is nicer to make a new world… but it is Ok.”

Up in the Air (2009) - Directed by Jason Reitman, based on a book of the same name by Walter Kirn

2010-02-24T13:07:00.000-08:00

This movie is about people who are adrift in the world. On one side are people who choose to fly away from the banality and pain of real life by avoiding complicated feelings and confining situations. On the other side are those people who are pushed off cliffs by someone who is whispering "fly! fly!" behind them.

Our main man who chooses to fly is played by George Clooney, star employee of a "We'll Fire Your Employees For You!" company. He is the one pushing the adrift but-not-by-choice people off the cliff.

Our man, who chooses to fly around in the air and not to be tied to a small piece of ground, still wants some good things from all over the ground – like dinner, a bit of respect, sex. To acquire those things, he does have to work for his ground money. Also, it helps that he looks like a grown-up. And though the thrills for him are pretty standardized, the living is good. The only real down side is that if one is safe from the pettiness of life (and the pettiness of other people's lives), one also tends to be safe from its surprises. So though our man travels all over America to fire people, we always feel like we're in the same place.

In a more obviously Hollywood movie, The George Clooney character would learn (with the help of a *very* special woman) to brave the treacherous and banal earthly ground for its sweet, sweet fruit.

But in this movie, there is a surprising and poetic turn of events. George Clooney's character turns out to be really, really good at flying around America and pushing people off of cliffs while whispering "fly! fly!" behind them. He's good at it because he kind-of means it. He kind-of believes there is always something better around the next corner, even for these people who look so sad. To these people he says - Why humbly tie ourselves to these small sections of the ground when we might become these great people around the next corner?

Real life tempts our man only once. When this happens he is tempted to rethink his philosophy. At this point, the firing sessions become almost unbearable to watch. With real life clouding his fantasies, he can only offer empathy for these people (who might possibly be having the worst day of their lives) and not very much of that special other-worldly-optimism.

The firings represented in "Up in the Air" are painfully realistic. Having non-actors talk about their real and recent lay off troubles while opposite a movie star (known for his "up in the air" quality) creates a very quiet but heartbreaking fairytale loop. The two different kinds of "adrift" continuously work unsuccessfully to resolve themselves or understand each other. They form a kind of American wrestling match in the air - either going up or going down (mostly going down). Some of the movie is heavy handed, but this part is interesting and beautiful.

After our man is tempted by real life, and then, after real life disappoints, he returns to his original star employee position at "We'll Fire People For You!". The last scene shows him alone, a little worse for wear, looking up at the departure board at an airport.

We're not sure if he still believes in flying - if he will still be able to make the lost people's worst days a little easier or at least a little more surreal with his other-worldly optimism that his faith in flying helps to ensure - but we know he still has to fly because he doesn't really know what else to do. Because we know this, we are kind of hoping that he is saying something crazily optimistic and reassuring to himself while he stands there alone at the gates of his familiar and well-worn home.

A Dirty Shame (2004) - Written and Directed by John Waters

2010-02-19T09:50:00.000-08:00

(Though I’m less lonely in the world because John Waters exists, and though I am crazy about his movies, I have avoided watching his “A Dirty Shame.” The cover image is of Selma Blair sporting the largest fake breasts one could prosthetically attach to a living person. Whenever I spot the dvd cover, something inside my body flinches. But recently, a short spell of serious men and their very serious work that I was supposed to be taking very seriously, drew me directly to this very same “A Dirty Shame” bright pink dvd cover at the video store – a cover that suddenly looked refreshing, good-natured and fun. I watched it early in the morning at my friend Sheila Heti’s house while she was out of town. She has the tiniest tv I have ever seen. I watched it with the volume on low hoping to not wake up the downstairs neighbors with anticipated comical sex noises.)

John Waters is not a boring man.

Also: John Waters is a genius at grounding complicated ideas in hilariously (and deceptively) simple concoctions of people, places, things and actions. This movie is about a zombiesque war between the “Neuters” and the “Sex Addicts”. Of course, this war is fought out on one street, Harford Road and primarily between the members of one family, the Stickles. The Neuters headquarters are at the local Quickymart, and are led by the matriarch of the Stickles family who is named “Big Ethel”. You can tell who the lead Neuters are when they are out on the street because they have their eggplant coloured Quickymart uniforms on. The Sex Addicts headquarters are at the Ray Ray’s Garage, you can tell who the Sex Addicts are because they are often sticking out their tongues. Ray Ray himself is a prophet who makes love to nature. Nature loves it. You can tell nature loves it because, after he does it with nature, nature immediately grows more flowers at a miraculous speed. And it’s clear that he’s a prophet because, very early on, he brings back to life a squirrel that he accidentally ran over with his Garage truck. Sex Addicts are made when they accidentally receive a concussion to the head. They can be “unmade” if they are accidentally knocked in the head again. The Sex Addicts are anxious for a prophesied invention of a new sex act. The Neuters just want to go home.

As you can see, there are pleasurable and solid answers for any question one might have about the plot of this movie. It made me think of my friend Kerry Barber (a filmmaker from the Yukon), of her 5 minute documentary “My Indian Bum” – a movie that also contains pleasurable and effortless answers. She asks people in her “Indian” community questions about their bums: Are Indian bum’s flat? Do you like flat bums? Why are Indian’s bums flat? People do their best to give concrete answers – for instance, one man answers this last question with, “I think they are flat because we are sitting down a lot."

I love nothing more than an unqualified answer. Why not provide the most reasonable answer with the information at hand? Why not assume the innate subjectivity (or fallibility) of any answer without the redundancy of qualification? Why not let the answers fall out of your mouth like solid objects – or at least to catch them on video that way? Why not understand that storytelling happens continuously in real life.

And in documentaries, the answers (that in life are flexible and wavering) do often become the concrete, unwavering bones of whatever large or small beast the documentary comes to form. One of the benefits of documentaries is that you are likely to build a functional (possibly even wonderfully absurd) animal if you begin with life. Because in life, there are a lot of reasonable, grounded and interesting answers.

One of the primary pleasures (and difficulties) with fiction is that you often need to know from the beginning what the answers are – what kind of beast it is that you are making. The more absurd the plot, the more concrete and grounded the bones need to be. John Waters’ bones are often hilarious and absurdly logical. His strangely shaped but functional beasts are perfectly engineered to roam freely with speed, freakish grace, and harmony through our real world. If there is a question about the beast or its skeleton, John Waters has the answer. He makes it look easy because he’s a gentleman (and also maybe too, because he is probably having a really good time).

Beau Travail (1999) - directed by Claire Denis

2010-02-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

I had first seen this without subtitles. It’s an unusual kind of beautiful and quiet, and involves all kinds of foreigners so it’s not so crazy to watch it as a foreigner – not understanding the words so well. The movie is about a unit of the French Foreign Legion that consists of French nationals (most of whom have different cultural backgrounds) commanded by an old school French officer. The unit is stationed in Djibouti, Africa. There is no war or combat. The men move together in loosely choreographed unison during their military training exercises and in their play. The feeling of watching it is almost a refreshing relief - the camera focuses on a landscape of moving bodies functioning harmoniously within a group and not on the lonely landscape of one person’s emoting face.

It reminded me of my time at Bible camp - somewhere north in the Appalachia Mountains. A time that involved being woken up with a bugle, circling around a flag with others to sing the national anthem at sunrise, washing and folding your clothes military style at the age of seven, racing each other all day across the lake or up the hills, abstractly practicing being at war while a literal enemy is never mentioned.

It reminded me of the feeling of being in a group - one that you are a member of without too much thought, a group that has no need for fights because there is a sense that the fight is somewhere outside of this place. It is a gentle animal kind of intimacy that happens with others when logical argument is not needed or wanted and no one thinks that there is anything new to be learned from talking. The peacefulness of the group can make you forget that you are the ones training to be the soldiers - a utopic and ironic vacation from trouble.

I saw "Beau Travail" again recently with English subtitles. Though a similar experience, the underlying Melville story of "Billy Budd" emerges more clearly. The commanding officer (the old school French Legionnaire) develops a jealous hatred for a lower ranking but better-loved soldier. The soldier has a beautiful, open face and was orphaned at a young age without knowledge of his heritage. Melville’s original story is an epic one of good verses evil, but here the battle between these two men is so quiet and so small. The troubling injustice that unfolds between them is but a tiny blip in this seductive but menacing landscape of unison. How could it be otherwise?

Whale Rider (2002), Directed by Niki Caro, Based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera

2010-02-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

(I watched Whale Rider at home on my TV while I was darning a burnt-out spot in a woven blanket. I didn't know very much about the movie. I mainly was thinking: "Whales".)

“Whale Rider” is about a young girl who, though having exhibited potential to be a great leader for her people during a time when a leader is desperately needed, is rejected by the rulers of the community because of her gender. These hints of her leadership are deemed sinister by the community leader who feels his people have already paid a heavy price for going against tradition - tradition dictates that a young boy will exhibit this potential.

I am used to the story of the runaway - the kid who finds relief and acceptance in a new place. Usually the kid has a talent that is not recognized by their community – or a talent that the community finds threatening or burdensome. Like a young boy from a small mining town whose traits hint that he is a possible ballet genius during a time of the town’s economically devastating strike.

But “Whale Rider” is a less familiar story for me: the disrespected and rejected kid who stays home. It seems like a harder story and a harder one to win. Pai, the young girl, stays where she is because her talents are in direct relation to her small shoreline community. Without her community, she is not a leader. She cannot go to the city to fulfill this specific potential.

So she keeps pressing in. She turns down a chance for easy escape. She secretly learns the specialized rituals and ways of her people (the same ways that are used to reject her). She circles around her domain and gets close when she can. She is continuously persistent, continuously hurt, and continuously forgiving.

The most uncomfortable part for me was not the main elder’s repeated rejection of Pai - but the image of them reconciled. It was hard to see this little girl sitting next to an old man who had thrown her out so many times. It is the best case scenario, and an important one, but I am still new to this story.

Pai narrates the movie, explaining sympathetically why her grandfather thought she was of no use when she was born, why some people saw her as a curse, why she was lonely. For me, the best thing about "Whale Rider" is that Pai’s narration subtly turns from the voice of a strangely sympathetic outsider into the voice of a sympathetic leader without her situation having yet changed in any way. A brave step either towards insanity or heroic leadership - but certainly the best and most reasonable action to take if there is nowhere else to go.

Meetin' WA (1986) - Jean-Luc Godard

2010-02-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

(I wrote about this video dialogue between Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard here for Ryeberg Curated Video site in a piece called "Meetin' WA and God'R in the Fute'R". )

Avatar (2010)

2010-02-02T21:12:00.001-08:00

(I went to see this with my friend Julia Rosenberg who is an independent film producer. She was game and looked pretty great in the 3d glasses. I tried to take our picture with my cell phone but you could only see 2 small white dots on a black screen. We saw it on a Friday nigh in one of the biggest movie houses in downtown Toronto. We saw it with maybe about 400 other people in an IMAX theatre.)

The first time I saw a movie at an IMAX theatre, I was nine. It was Christmas and it was Texas and I was with a lot of adults. I had on sneakers and a purple mini skirt. The adults bought tickets for a visual spectacle called “Earth” maybe, or something like that. We sat up close. The movie was about how we as humans were polluting the planet.

They showed images taken from above the earth to show how factories changed the colour of lakes and rivers. They showed images taken from ground to show how the sky was changing from everyday pollution. They showed people at work throwing their lunch waste in bins and then they followed their lunch waste to the dumps. They showed property development, clear cutting, forest fires, animals fleeing, deserts being created and rivers running dry. I remember there was a narrator with a soothing female voice. Half way through, I vomited. I was cleaned up in a bathroom by one of the adults and then taken back in to the horror. As I watched the rest of the movie, shivering, everything changed.

For me, the movie was an emergency newscast. But of course, when the lights came up, the adults around me (who had more experience with emergency newscasts) had to decide what we were going to have for dinner. This confusion is always part of our lives. After that movie, I always remembered how we didn’t go to war that day, how sunsets looked a little more sinister to me, and how much was my fault.

If I had, instead, seen "Avatar" in an IMAX theatre when I was nine, I think I probably would not have thrown up. I probably would have been excited about all the other 3D movies to come, and relaxed in knowing that there were seriously bad intentioned bad guys out there who weren’t me or my people. All we had to do was stop them, or maybe even they would have the good sense to stop themselves after watching this movie, and then we would get the flying horses back.

The moment “Avatar” ended and the credits started to roll, laughter sprung quietly from various corners of the huge audience. There was no applause, but also no booing. We had to give our glasses back on our way out. Mine had become filthy somehow by the end of the movie. The next day, I had no feeling about any of it but I did start to wonder when white men will begin to openly complain, along with the rest of us, about having to play stereotypes of themselves in fiction.

Broken Embraces (2009) – written and directed by Pedro Almodovar

2010-01-27T19:50:00.000-08:00

(My friend Lorin Stein asked me what I thought of this movie. He told me that he saw it with his sister - in a cinema in New York. He said that they were the only two who were laughing, but that later, alone at home, he felt sad. I saw it alone in Toronto, at the Bloor Varsity cinema, on a rainy afternoon. Under my raincoat and galoshes, I had on a satin purple zebra print on the outside, teddy bear fur on the inside, hoodie and tight pale blue jeans. I notice that I sometimes unintentionally dress in the anticipated aesthetic of the movie I am about to watch.)

In Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious" (1946), a beautiful new wife (played by Ingrid Bergman) is held captive and is slowly being poisoned to death by her husband because he found out that she is only pretending to be a Nazi. Really, she is a spy and she is actually in love with another spy (Cary Grant). In "Broken Embraces", a beautiful young girlfriend (played by Penelope Cruz) is physically tortured by her old and wealthy boyfriend because he found out that she is only pretending to be a capitalist whore. Really, the woman is an actress and she is in love with a film director. She is starring in a film that is being directed by this love (whom she met while auditioning for the main lead). The film is financed by the old and wealthy boyfriend.

And though in “Notorious”, the woman literally couldn’t escape, the woman in “Broken Embraces” chooses not to escape in order to allow the show (the movie) to go on. The obstacles to love in “Broken Embraces” are a little bit more make-believe than in “Notorious”. But this is a wonderful thing - like kids playing a game so enthusiastically that it becomes real. I like that in Almodovar’s movies. It’s not ineffective drama, it is just drama that is its own game and is never required to be in direct relation to the forces that are suggested to have created it. And we know that in this pretend and real creation of romance, Penelope Cruz and the director really do love each other. And it’s real because they decided to make it real.

The sad part, though, comes when this brief romance and romance-playing is ended by a car accident that kills the woman. The accident also leaves the director traumatized and blind. This sad part lasts for 14 years. Immediately after the accident, the director abandons his name Mateo Blanco and calls himself Harry Cain. I think the name Harry Cain is a film noir reference, but during the movie, it kept sounding like “hurricane”. I kept thinking "hurricane" while watching a man barely moving and choosing not to live while attentive friends, also not quite living, circle around him.

We accept and understand sad and lifeless periods, but we want life at the end, before we go home. What good is the ability to make-believe drama if you can't create it when you need it most? I believe the last act of “Broken Embraces” was an attempt at a happy conclusion – of life reentering the scene for the 3 remaining characters. But all we see is a blind man staring blindly at a film, a lovelorn woman staring lovingly at a blind man, and a taken-for-granted son smiling agreeably at everything. The happiness on their faces makes it seem like something has changed, but their faces are all beaming at something that can’t look back at them - things that they have already been looking at this whole time. And though we had hoped that they were in the process of mending their half-alive selves, we actually see that all of their combined efforts just went into polishing a jewel of the director’s past – restoring the film from 14 years ago that starred the director’s love. We are still in the sad part. When I left the theatre I noticed that I was inappropriately dressed.

It would have been great if the movie was contained in 1994, the first year of this long 14 year story. It could have ended with this scene that, as it is, takes place in the middle of the movie: Judith, the long suffering and lovelorn producer picks up the newly blinded director from the site of the tragedy and takes him to the sea with her young son. When it is time to leave and go back to the city, she calls the director’s name and he doesn't respond, she eventually tries his new name - the name, she was told at the hospital, that he now responds to. She calls out “Harry Cain!”. With this, he turns around gleefully towards her voice (the happiest we’ve seen him after the accident, a smile that is real but contains the absurdity of tragedy and games and the ridiculousness and freedom of being someone new) and says “Yes!!??” If the movie ended there, we would leave the cinema believing that maybe Harry Cain knew, like we know, that there is much real life to be created with made-up personas and new chapters, even if they start off dark and troubled and in terrible pain. Ingrid Bergman knew it!

Trapped in the Closet - by R. Kelly (2005 - - - - -

2010-01-26T18:54:00.000-08:00

(By the time I got through 7 chapters of R. Kelly's music video epic "Trapped in the Closet", I was really excited to write about it. I was watching the 3 to 4 minute video chapters all in a row on Youtube. Initially, I was just going to watch a few of them but I couldn't stop - the narrative was so addictively narrative. But by the time I reached the last chapter, Chapter 22 (which ends with a "To Be Continued"), I was completely confused. I will wait for the remaining chapters.)

Waiting & To Be Continued.

The Godfather (1972) - Written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Francis Ford Coppola

2010-01-22T09:25:00.000-08:00

(At a diner with red cushioned booths, as the theme song from "The Godfather" played from the radio, my friend Lynn Crosbie asked me what good could possibly come of "The Godfather". Like most people, I have seen it as many times as I’ve seen “It’s A Wonderful Life”.)

Before I had first seen “The Godfather” movie, it was a book I had come across when I was eight. My grandmother had it next to the Bible in her living room. I remember wondering if the adults around had read these two books since they both suggested different morals than what I had, so far, been let in on. Though no one seemed to mind that I was reading them. It is good that books are not rated.

While reading - this is what I paid most attention to:

Sonny (Don Corleone’s son) had an abnormally large penis and Lucy (Don Corleone’s daughter’s bridesmaid) had a technically loose vagina. They were both miserable (or caused others misery) until they had the good fortune of finding each other and fitting together so perfectly. When Sonny was shot down, Lucy was alone and miserable again. But then she again had good fortune and fell in love with a surgeon who then diagnosed her with “loose vagina”. He easily repaired the problem with a simple surgery, then provided her with normal sexual pleasure. Mainly what stayed with me was this idea of “good fortune”. But anyway, this part didn’t make it to Francis Ford Coppola’s movie. So back to the movie and the *what good of it*.

The thing that makes “The Godfather” so easy to watch over and over again is the same thing that it’s good for.

Don Corleone looks out at his children. He is old so he knows the great precariousness of one’s path in life. He knows that sometimes the young get eaten up early and sometimes they become monsters. He knows their fates are owed more to their natures and to their luck than anything he could say to them so he doesn’t say very much. But once, he couldn’t help himself. At a time when he was becoming more careless in life, he leans over to Michael (his youngest son – the one he both longs to always see and to protect) and tells him that women and children can be careless, but men cannot.

But the reason that it’s possible to watch this tragic and bloody movie so many times is because Don Corleone is careless. Careless mistakes (to be separated here from intentional mistakes) made in “The Godfather” are the only thriving life to be found in the mostly-dark-with-blood-red-accents aesthetic that surrounds the men in their business. A kitten, some oranges, a look of love not managed to be hidden, a fit of protective rage, any acts of playfulness – these are the foreign elements to be cautious of in this masculine world. These foreign elements are both hopeful and dangerous. They let life in, but they also can let death in. These elements are the only windows. We want Don Corleone to be both careful and careless. We don’t want to see him get shot, but we do want to see irrepressible love come across his face in the wrong moment. It is what makes this movie tolerable.

It makes sense that Don Corleone felt compelled to give this advice to Michael. Michael was also a foreign element when the movie begins – the only son outside of the family business. Don Corleone has a weakness to protect him. In a way, we too want Michael to be very careful as we watch him enter the family business and watch as his world physically grows darker around him.

But within 3 hours, we are most seriously grieved to see Michael take this advice. We see him become more careful than his father was ever capable of being. We literally see the doors shut around him and we are left on the other side with Diane Keaton. It is the success of this carefulness that looks like death to all of us. And though we no longer have to fear for his physical safety, we know for sure in our hearts that his is the worst fate. And this is where we are left when the movie ends. It makes sense that we want to start from the beginning again. To see a sudden amusement in Don Coreleon’s face, to see him play with a ginger cat, to reach for the oranges, to have the good luck to survive his business, to be able to retire and enter this mythical world of women and children’s carelessness, to die at the peak of his carelessness – only playing at being the monster for the amusement of his grandson.

And again - as we are left at the end of the movie, now watching Michael only playing at being a loving family man while never betraying a false note in business - it is good to be reminded that despite the good fortune we think we want and others want for us, we need more than anything these moments of carelessness, to allow for the mistakes that make us and the journey more tolerable.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) - written and directed by Terry Gilliam

2010-01-18T14:02:00.000-08:00

( I went alone to the Bloor St. Varsity Cinemas on a Saturday night. All the shows were sold out except for “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”. The movie is about an old man who - with some help - carts his old-timey fantastical show around a contemporary city looking for an audience. I sat in the middle seat of the front row. Two young French women sat beside me. The one closest to me was wearing a furry white beret.)

Sometimes a Terry Gilliam movie is like playing with the funniest and most sorrowful kid who decides with you what the cardboard box you two are always playing with will be today. But sometimes a Terry Gilliam movie can feel like playing with an adult who already knows what impossible world he wants to make and *you are not really sure why you are there*. And though I think that I would take a bullet for him, I tend to avoid some of his movies.

But in this one, his groundless imagination and fantastical aesthetic are firmly contained inside an old wagon pulled by horses along the contemporary streets of downtown London. And though there seems to be a suggestion that the "real world" is losing the imagination war - I was very happy to be seeing the real world. Inside the wagon, and specifically through a magic mirror, a world of imagination exists that is just as infinite as the one outside. But we always know, when we are there, that it is Dr. Parnassus’s world and not necessarily our own. It was much easier to appreciate what was inside the wagon – once I knew who’s wagon it was and where in the world the wagon was located.

Four men and Parnassus' beautiful young daughter cart the wagon around, hustling for their living to diminishing audiences and occasionally saving or damning some souls - including their own.

At turning 16, Dr. Parnassus’s daughter is to be reimbursed to the devil. Dr. Parnassus spares her this information until one hour before her 16th birthday. He has hesitated telling her because he was hoping to reverse the situation through some more bargaining. When he does finally confess his pact with the devil, he tells her that he might have a few tricks left from his imagination at this late hour- that he might be able to save her still. She becomes furious. She screams "I am sick and tired of your imagination!! I have lived with your imagination my entire life and I want no more of it!".

I am not sure if Terry Gilliam is resigning himself to thinking that this "war of imagination" is being lost or if he understands that maybe it is a different game now. Based on the evidence of "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", I would guess that, in various parts of his mind, he believe both things to be true. And fortunately for the audience, the grounding of the wild imagination here in such a logical and interesting manner combined with the unusually humble approach he seems to have taken with the whole project, contribute to the success and the magic of the movie.

When I left the theatre (practically walking in a circle and trying to shove open the door to a broom closet that I thought was the washroom I was so disoriented) and walked home through the streets of contemporary Toronto, I felt a little bit of what I imagine Terry Gilliam must feel a lot when he leaves his eyes open and walks through contemporary London - the world is sometimes as magical as a cardboard box.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans - directed by Werner Herzog

2010-01-13T16:29:00.000-08:00

(I watched this with my boyfriend Misha Glouberman at my favourite movie house in Toronto, the Royal on College St., It is a big cinema that is always pretty near empty. Sometimes you see the directors standing outside smoking and once I saw the main actor - in the movie I had just watched - sitting at the back with her friends. The conversations before this movie started were hilarious. People explaining to their companions who Werner Herzog is. People explaining to their companions who Nicolas Cage is. It sounded like no one had seen the first Bad Leitenent movie – the one where Harvey Keitel was acting. I hadn’t either. The movie was out of focus for the first 10 minutes, but then the projectionist fixed it.)

If life is art for you and you are living your life and in your life you want to watch a Hollywood cop movie that’s about America, you go see this movie, cause it’s like you’re dreaming a cop movie about America in public with other people around you. And for you, maybe most of life is art – but sometimes it is more so.

Sometimes the movie comes into focus as a real cop flick complete with a banquet ceremony and a happily pregnant ex-prostitute and then it goes back out again to the place where you’ve been dancing to the beat for a million years in an unconscious stupor.

I like best Werner Herzog's documentaries. They always seem more bizarre than a straight fiction is often capable of being and his strange voice-overs are a big part of this. It's actually kind of generous to suddenly tell the audience, with a dead serious and floating voice, what metaphor we are to go with while we watch a bear coming towards the camera. It’s a hard thing to do because a German-accented voice-over is pretty near some people's definition of pretentious. But when Herzog does it, it is the opposite. It’s accessible. He is not ever being mysterious or windy, he is shooting down metaphors with a pellet gun and saying – wow, look at this one. We are all coming from different places – it’s helpful and interesting to know where the director is coming from and where he is going. Telling the audience straight-up is one way to go about it.

No voice-overs in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans" cause it's not that kind of movie. But a similar need/ instinct to lock down the metaphors comes out. The most beautiful and hilarious one happens immediately after an intense crack-smoking session when there is a shoot-out between a group of 3 men on one side of a room and a group of 4 men (this group including Nicolas Cage) on the other. The 3 men fall to their deaths, the group of 4 remain standing in the silence of the gun-smoke filled room.

Nicolas Cage is the only man without a gun. He suddenly yells “Shoot him again!” One of the other 4 men says “They’re all dead, man.” Cage says, “Shoot that one again - his soul is still dancing!” Because of Cage’s intense drug use and constant hallucinations throughout the movie, we assume that he is literally seeing a soul dancing. We have also witnessed him talking to others, without too much concern for being considered crazy, about things he sees that are clearly not being seen by others. So as he says "his soul is still dancing!" we see a straight double, of one of the men lying and dying on the floor, upright and dancing a crazy jig – then we watch the slow fall as one last bullet goes through his body. We know that what we are seeing is a representation of another man's hallucination and not only a suggestive metaphor. For Herzog, it’s always this kind of heavy and simple poetry – patiently tying anything ethereal to the ground so that it can't get away, and so that we can remember where it came from.

It made me think that the seed of this project was Herzog thinking - I wonder what a soul looks like when it is dying and fighting and dancing all at the same time.

Hysterical Blindness - directed by Mira Nair

2010-01-12T11:09:00.000-08:00

(I was attracted to the cover of this DVD, the cover featuring Juliette Lewis, Uma Thurman and Gena Rowlands, in the drama section at the video store. I was looking for "Paris, je t'aime" which Gena Rowlands is also in and I got confused. I would like it if Juliette Lewis played herself in a lot of movies. I watched "Hysterical Blindness" at home while it snowed outside. The movie takes place mostly during sun warm dusks in a late summer New Jersey - which was pleasant. When the streetcars go by, my TV screen turns everything green for a second. )

The movie is a fiction made by mostly outsiders to a very specific time and location – working class New Jersey in the 80s. It is about two women who live in houses, go to work, and then, every night, go to the same bar – Olly’s.

Olly’s seems to be the only place for them that holds any promise of change or validation. That they do this every night is not boring. You can see them shivering with discomfort and excitement at every evening’s arrival – leaving the warm, beautiful dusk outside and opening Olly’s door towards possibility. It made me think of what that is for other people – this one location of fear and potential, how specific and limited the structures can be that end up becoming the sole place where we look to for life’s potential.

The perspective of the movie doesn’t make fun of the women too much and life’s ecstasy and pain are pretty wonderfully full within their restricted stage, a pleasure to watch. Though throughout the movie, the many bridges and train tracks in the background - never crossed over or discussed by the two characters (but heavily paid attention to by the camera) - loom large like slightly condescending angels around them.

This made me think of Agnes Varda’s “The Beaches of Agnes”, a movie she made in 2008 about making movies. In one scene she stands in front of a house in a dense neighborhood where she had lived as a young woman. Now she is an older woman in front of the camera holding a giant blue electrical chord on a big spool. She explains that the chord is 300 meters long – and that the only source for electricity that she could use for filming was in her house. She explains that the film she wanted to make had to be shot within a 300 meter radius around her house or else the crew wouldn’t be able to plug their equipment in. An early lesson for and from one of the reigning geniuses in contemporary documentaries/fiction: sometimes one’s own limitations are more interesting than other people’s.

Antichrist - written and directed by Lars von Trier

2010-01-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

(I watched this at the Carlton theatre in Toronto right before the theatre closed permanently. I went with my friends Carl Wilson (critic) and Ryan Kamstra (poet) and saw it late on a Friday night. There were spurts of uncomfortable and uncontrollable laughter (possibly very healthy and necessary for watching this movie). Afterwards, we excitedly wandered the streets - hysterical and a little confused. I think this is the ideal way to see this movie – particularly with a poetic critic and a critical poet – and a painter who keeps getting the phrases “genital mutation” and “genital mutilation” mixed up.)

At one point, while watching this movie, I think I felt an actual prick of jealousy because it was so good. Another part of my brain was thinking – Lars von Trier? Genius film about misogyny?? And the loudest part of my brain was yelling – Ack! Shut your eyes!! We don’t know what she is going to do with that old piece of farm equipment. We don’t, as eyes, want to even see the farm equipment!!

It has always seemed weird to me that the murder of tens of thousands of women during those centuries of hysterical woman-burning is still dealt with much more by the Monty Pythons out there than ever really the Steven Speilbergs. Though I’m super glad, for the sake of my people, that gynocide skipped over Speilberg once again in 2009, and am *sort of* glad that it went to Von Trier. It had never occurred to me that this literal subject matter could be used in such a grounded fashion in such a contemporary story about the contemporary world. Lars Von Trier manages to make a kind-of simple and stunning film with this for a heart. The plot of this is less of a clever, or damning, one-liner than his other films are, it’s much more complicated and searching – more intuitive and alive. Visually - completely right, even just one of the two main characters “He” carrying around a piece of crumpled lined paper with an absurdly simple, sometimes stupid, chart of what “She” is *irrationally* fearing. He keeps adjusting the words on the chart to match his slow observances – the best kind of poem-making ever. If I could have this piece of crumpled paper, I would keep it close always. She is a bit broken as a human with a recent tragedy and he is attempting to cure her. He is broken too and curing her is his attempted cure for himself. They have gone to their remote cottage for this task. The last use for this place of isolation was her lone attempt to finish her thesis on gynocide.

On this trip, He eventually stumbles across her somewhat hidden work room. We see all of her abandoned academic work as She had left it from the year before. We see the evidence of her work as He sees it - the subject matter starting from horrific historical pictures of women being tortured and burned to her dense and lengthy academic writing turning then to loose and frantic gibberish (a pretty and logical sequence). At this He becomes more actively worried for her state of mind and maybe a bit more unconsciously worried for himself. Later in a casual attempt, without confessing that he has seen her work room, he asks cautiously what happened with her thesis – asking what she left off saying about gynocide. She replied offhandedly something like, “..well… the women were punished . . because they were evil”. His calm, arrogant psycho-analytic façade fell away as he sputtered, “What?! You’re an academic! You are supposed to be critical of these things!!” And she replied calmly, as though correcting herself in a dream, “Oh, of course… I don’t know why I just said that”.

This is exactly when I got jealous. It is one of the most genius stories I have ever heard of:

Woman writes thesis about misogyny - gets confused.

Twilight, a blockbuster (2008) - Based on the book by Stephenie Meyer

2010-01-06T20:58:00.000-08:00

(I watched this late at night on my computer in sections on Youtube. I came across some of the footage when I was on the internet looking for white skin for a painting I am working on. I was intrigued. The video clips were elongated so that all the figures had very tall skinny heads and bodies. Also, I probably missed a bit of the movie with the different sections not matching up and I couldn't find the first sequence.)

When I was watching this I thought - I can’t believe no one has told me to see this. The vampires are vegetarians! The trees are so tall and everyone is so beautiful and sad. Also, it is raining all the time and there is a teenage girl movie star who never smiles and barely says anything and who doesn’t work hard at making the more awkward more comfortable.

I love a story that takes facts from the real banality of life and uses those facts to tell the most seductive lies. Boy is mean to girl (because he loves her so much he might kill her so he has to be mean to keep her safe from himself). They don’t have sex (because it is too dangerous for him to lose control, he might kill her. There is some natural and light S and M (right before he kisses her for the first time, out of caution for her - he tells her “don’t move”). He shouldn’t bring her to meet his family (because they might kill her – she smells better than most humans and the temptation to go non-vegetarian with her is high). Finally, a girl in a movie desired so perfectly and so perfectly left wanting. It is the most convincing and conventional romance novel. Maybe this is dangerous for young people who will be sorely disappointed by their first loves – or willing to convert religions for them, but it is not dangerous for me.

The girl is very clumsy and the boy, with his supernatural powers and focused attention on her, finds himself continuously and instinctively saving her in the nick of time from physical harm. There is a moment where she trips slightly, he catches her and immediately annoyed says “can you at least look where you walk”. NICE.

I also love how the parents are the ones who are always texting at the wrong time and whose own love is stupid and silly and vain. But the vampires are A LOT older than the parents so it makes sense that they are more serious.

The Name of the Rose (1986) – based on the book by Umberto Eco

2010-01-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

(I watched this on video while babysitting my friend Amy Bowles' kid. It was on top of the adult movies and underneath the kids movies. I think the sounds from this movie gave him a nightmare, so I missed a bit in the middle. The movie’s about a lost book of comedy so it is not very funny. I had seen this before when I was younger – maybe on tv.)

This is my favorite thing about this movie:

The oldest monk in the Abbey thinks Aristotle’s book of comedy is too disgusting and dangerous for the world, but he also can’t bring himself to destroy it. So the old monk keeps it hidden in a secret library. The secret library is mostly surrounded by other monks at the Abbey who seem to mostly all have different kinds of physical deformities. I think the old monk’s idea is that it is less dangerous to let those deformed (in body and therefore presumably in spirit) near to this dangerous text because their purity is already compromised in some obvious way. The ones who get killed by the *literally* poisoned book are the youngest and most perfectly formed of the monks. Maybe they are the ones who are most actively kept away from the book and who are not taught how to handle it without killing themselves.

It was hard to not see this structure in my head for a few days after – this dangerous book of comedy surrounded by those deformed in body and spirit, who are in turn surrounded by the scholars circling, trying to get in to see what is at the center of the surprising deaths. I think we are to identify with the logical scholars – the clean and ready-to-go Sean Connery and Christian Slater, but it is hard not to identify completely with the deformed monks (especially the beautiful and ready-to-agree Ron Perlman), or the one female character (the filthy, grunting and seductive peasant girl known as "the girl" - Valentina Vargas), or even just with the book.

z

2009-12-30T11:08:00.000-08:00

x

2009-12-30T11:07:00.001-08:00

stories about movies i've seen
in 2010