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

(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.

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

(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.

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

(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

(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.

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

(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

(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.

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

(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

(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.

Wild Ocean (2008) - from GIANT SCREEN FILMS

(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.

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

(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”.

I-Be AREA (2007) - by Ryan Trecartin

( I first saw Ryan Trecartin's I-Be AREA in 2007, in a small New York gallery, projected onto a large wall. I was with my friends Sheila Heti and Martha Sharpe. 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. Before this I had seen slightly earlier work of his on Youtube and a few other places. Jon Davies and Helena Reckitt recently curated a show of his that opens this week at the Power Plant museum in Toronto. A few nights ago, in my studio, I watched I-Be Area again from start to finish on UbuWeb, before going to the new show. )

I-Be AREA makes it seem like addressing the most difficult subjects is easy and obvious 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 are children and young people and a collective of mothers, who run a bead store and have a preference for girl children and adoption.

Here, the characters' bodies know the value of reproduction 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 fail when they are doing what they have to do? 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 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 searches for meaning and 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 it can take people awhile to figure out the words to talk about the new structures found there. For instance, identities. 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 in echos within the pages of 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 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 1990s, always in a new city with nearly a blank past. If we want to change, we have to change publicly – in front of our employers, our constructed families and our anonymous publics. 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.

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 the people who thought they knew them. 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 idea of an “original” that never changes or grows seems less ideal than puritanical - a little freakish and a lot oppressive. Combined also with these new self-generated "I"s are the other "I" realities created by different people - other people capturing our actions, recording our words, 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 the copies 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 of the "I"s, there is an increased awareness of others' "I"s. Increasing confusion but also empathy, so there is less of a need to run away. We are all here, even if we are brand new and wobbly 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, like the dream of what art could be, banned by a pope and speaking to us directly, so strange but feeling like it has always been here. It's the kind of work that shows us something about the present we are in, illuminating it 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.