Friday, July 31, 2009

MJT Fan Club

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a place of the most wonderful fantasies, full of miracles and invented realities. The exhibits of real objects acquire the quality of fever dreams. A must for all visitors to Los Angeles.

— Werner Herzog, Aug 10 issue of Time magazine

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Great World of Sound

Some idiot is going to invent a Rat Pack-variation nickname for this North Carolinian consortium of indie filmmakers, if there be justice in the world. They deserve the publicity.

David Gordon Green was the first on the scene at the turn of the decade, whispering the spell of America's rusted back forty. Since then Ramin Bahrani has found a cogent paradigm for our domestic identity in the new century (ironically, or perhaps fittingly, by resurrecting Italy's postwar neorealism); Jody Hill now stands to challenge the incumbent Judd Apatow with a spoonful of bitter medicine, and I just witnessed Craig Zobel pull off a queasy trick of docufiction that frames our complicity in shilling the American Dream. What these directors share is an affinity for viewing American life from its unglamorous angles. That is not to say the view is ugly, disparaging or even unromantic, but rather modest. I find it most agreeable. Noble in its truth.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Korea I. Ki-duk Kim

We cooked all the fish we used in the film and ate them, expressing our appreciation. I've done a lot of cruelty on animals in my films. And I will have a guilty conscience for the rest of my life.
Director Ki-duk Kim commenting on The Isle (2000), in the making of which many animals were harmed; assorted fish and frogs are caught, bludgeoned, peeled, electrocuted, gutted and eaten alive. Kim does not spare his own species here or in Bad Guy (2001) from a steady regimen of gorings and the occasional unmentionable employ of fishhooks (simulated, I pray). The critters at least are exempt from inevitable bondage to a life of prostitution, unlike the women. A rough survey depicts Kim's characters tending to sadism as a pastime between stops on the daily circuit of squatting, fucking, killing and eating (there is a great deal of each).

But lest I make Kim's movies sound overly like torture porn or the more disposable entries at a J-horror geekshow, I voice a reedy protest that his long passages of meditative quiet, photographed and measured with deliberate, lyrical beauty, raise a somewhat ambiguous mist of regret over the events. He would seem to regard an amorally feral existence (such as all children are born into) and its attendant suffering as inherent to us and possibly suitable — not as punishment for original sin, but as a factual reflection of our place as animals in the natural world. Kim even suggests that the life of lofty pursuits brings a keener pain; his most despairing character is the boy in The Isle, an artist who twists delicate sculptures out of wire and wants to die. His female foil and the eponymous Bad Guy, on the other hand, are feral survivors. They do love, but in a brutal manner that demands painful self-sacrifice and cruel rites of purification, as if all attachments had to be expunged before the uncanny bond of a mated pair can be struck. This is a fearfully close approach to the excruciating oeuvre of Lars von Trier.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2004) offers Kim's only alternative to these bittersweet lives: The placid retreat of a solitary Buddhist monk, where a gentler comity with one's nature can be achieved by following the path of ultimate isolation and, in the end, transcendental suicide. Sadly, this is not for everyone.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Braid

A boy ruminates on mistakes he made and things he lost. The wishes and memories comingle, as vague and specific as a girl. The world moves on as you are borne back ceaselessly into the past, seeking an idyll that was or never was; the conflagration you flee is the ruined future others must live. Trying to understand what went wrong is like working out puzzles of time. You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally.


The personal web page of video game designer Jonathan Blow — creator of Braid — includes a link to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Whoa.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Communication Breakdown



Hunting for ridiculous metal bands is terrific fun if, like me, you live for the activity of invading and assimilating one insular sphere of lore after another. It is admirable to be omnivorous and ever-curious in one's nerdish habit.

I return from expedition with a map of divers and heretofore uncharted lands: The Boschian landscape of exxxtreme rock. I report to the amazement of all that, no matter your walk of life, somewhere to be found cavorting among the multifarious denizens of this former terra incognita is a stygian troupe that's custom-made for you. The beasts are like Cabbage Patch Kids, in that way.

Do you most enjoy vocals delivered as an authoritarian bark, a frenetic shriek, a soaring wail or a bilious grunt? Prefer the tempo oozingly slow, ultrafast or ludicrous speed? Are you most interested in stark social commentary, blasphemous incantations, paeans to viking glory or senseless bloody mayhem? When listening would you rather be compelled to bang your head, bang a slut, slay a dragon, curbstomp a cleric, cower in terror or swallow glass? Someone should code this into a fun Facebook app!!

A brief comment on the figures. Let it be clear that punk rock is ultimately responsible for every twig on the tree save glam metal, doom metal and three of its subspecies. The three main branches of hardcore-inspired metal — thrash, black and death — and their excitable cousin power metal are all outgrowths of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (aka speed metal), which was itself a response to the sped-up tempos and aggression of the London punk explosion of 1977.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

The Lion in Winter

An English professor is stopped by a man begging for spare change. The professor admonishes him, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Shakespeare." The beggar replies, "Fuck you! Mamet."
Barry Lyndon was the only English-language costume drama for which I had any special affection, until now. The old joke sprang to mind while watching The Lion in Winter (adapted from the 1966 stage play): As I roared with delight at the verbal bombardment and scribbled down vituperative quote after quote I received the uncanny insight that the professor and the beggar had struck up a friendship and, over a lunch of whiskey and mustard, distilled one of Shakespeare's histories down to high molar acid.

Picture Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? relocated to a cozy Christmas eve in a French castle, shortly before the Third Crusade. Peter O'Toole is the bellowing King Henry II, a knottily virile goat who has called together his vindictive wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn clenched in rigor mortis), and their three rancorous sons (including Anthony Hopkins' film debut as Richard the Lionheart) from their various seats of imprisonment, exile and asylum for a peaceable yuletide chat about the matter of the inheritance of the Angevin Empire. The youngest, wretched Prince John, squirms and wails over his neglected and unloved lot, "My God, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out!" Hopkins: "Let's strike a flint and see."

The holiday backdrop is crucial. The Church, centered between these bloodless predators peeled of all gentle sentiment, is mocked and spat upon. Hepburn gets the best lines. Asked whether some agreement is possible at the bargaining table she hisses, "In a world where carpenters get resurrected, anything is possible." The thrust of the screenplay is that we are magnificent savages and the Church but one of our obscenities. Christendom in the Middle Ages was a criminal syndicate brandishing a writ to murder, rape and inflict human misery everywhere the cross could be borne. Those in power were priviledged to take note that piety was immaterial. Hepburn again: "When I was little Christmas was a time of great confusion to me. The Holy Land had two kings — God and Uncle Raymond. I never knew who's birthday we were celebrating."

But whether or not you relish browbeating the clergy this script is a thing to savor. Reminiscing about her first marriage,
I even made poor Louis take me on crusade — how's that for blasphemy? I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn...but the troops were dazzled.
The humor, flashing like O'Toole's bits of azure, is frequently knowing and toys with anachronism: A threatened and defenseless Prince John cries out to mother that Richard has a knife. Mother snaps, "Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians."

And: Henry's mistress, informed that he is off to Rome to see the pope, gasps with worry, "He's excommunicated you again?"


Barry Lyndon of course is the most beautifully photographed of all color films — notable in a genre that is virtually defined by gaudy, obvious and excessive production design. The Lion in Winter is another exception. Filmed on location in medieval France, the castle and its rudely clothed inhabitants have an understated authenticity; cold, winter-bare and crusty without being overly somber. Pale sunlight above, hungry dark below.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Harry Potter and the Sixth Damn Movie

Each successive movie makes me feel more like I'm wasting my time. Not because they are bad, but because the source material seems to be good.

I know my way around fantasy serials, and one of their pleasures can be the gradual accumulation and indexing of lore. This is especially true of Potter, even more so than Tolkien. The history of Middle Earth is so vast that you do not hope to comprehend it all (let us peasants leave the Silmarillion safely in the hands of illuminati) but rather to be drawn along like a wide-eyed hobbit amidst Bigger Things. The Potter books, on the other hand, are designed to give you total access. You expect and are expected to understand every little detail, by the end. The fun is in wrapping your arms all the way around that density of references to thumdigglers and slugwockles and cries of ovis tenebris! No medium but the written word can provide the fullness of that experience.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Every Which Way But Loose + Any Which Way You Can

Somehow I didn't expect a comedy starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan to be quite this absurdist.

I thought it sounded like a fairly reasonable premise, but evidently the writer* felt he had been given license to embrace the Buñuel school of plotless non sequitur. At times like a laconic Blues Brothers, complete with country western bar brawl, ticked off lawmen and California Nazis, this little joke is a tad more sophisticated than its Landis/Ramis/Reitman contemporaries. To wit, most every sequence is played straight, as if from a perfectly sensible movie. But they add up to less and less and somewhere between the point when Clint randomly terrorizes a snotty coed and the irrelevent reel during which Clint relentlessly terrorizes some nimrod bikers (culminating in the sublime moment when Clyde drives a street sweeper off a produce loading dock) one starts to suspect that the joke is on you and your expectations of Dirty Harry Callahan. This is more successful self-parody than when, say, Arnold got pregnant.


* The IMDb entry on writer Jeremy Joe Kronsberg includes this succinct bio: "Often referred to as the godfather of the modern ape chase movie."

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The Uninvited (2009)

Seeing these on consecutive days was Unintentional. Also Unrewarding and Unrecommended. At least this one actually is a remake of Korean seupaem.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The Unborn (2009)

I was surprised and saddened to learn, after the fact, that this turd is an original American product and not a remake of East Asian spam. That would be more forgivable. (I allow the dragon his vices.)

Explorers

Drive-in totals for this yardsale of 80s kid movie standards:

No dead bodies
No breasts
1 bloody nose
2 child stars (Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix)
1 kid with head in the clouds
1 unlikely kid scientist
1 cynical kid, implied child abuse
4 inattentive parents
1 dad's new girlfriend
1 prepubescent blond babe
1 school bully, with goons
1 math test
2 times called on in class while daydreaming
2 times obnoxious bitch raised hand, answered correctly
5 cool hangouts (rooftop, hilltop, creek, basement lab, workshed)
1 talking mouse, vulgar
1 troublesome cat
1 vicious junkyard dog
1 humorous gopher
1 Masters of the Universe comic book prop
128kB RAM
2 Star Wars references
1 Star Trek reference
1 shout-out to Bruce Springsteen
1 Maltese Falcon reference
1 Citizen Kane reference
4 homages to Chuck Jones (Joe Dante trademark)
4 classic sci-fi movie clips (The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth, It Came From Another World!)
1 lovable stop motion robot
3 lovable alien muppets
1 spaceship fashioned out of derelict carnie ride
2 alien spaceships ripped off from A New Hope
3 counts substance use by minors
2 inexplicable chewing gum gags
1 instance move made at drive-in
gratuitous I want my MTV-era music video interlude
coed hand-holding
smooching
continuous headphone usage
multiple cloud-flying sequences
multiple Tron ripoff sequences
abundant Atari Tempest-based FX
NASA worship
show-stopping cameo by Dick Miller (Joe Dante trademark)
exploding shed
exploding concession stand
helicopter chase (no crash)
spaceship crash (no burn)
playground fu
psychic lightning fu
inertia fu
Flubber fu
3 stars — check it out

Friday, July 3, 2009

Public Enemies

The movie Dillinger saw at the Biograph was Manhattan Melodrama, the first of two pictures released in May 1934 by director W.S. Van Dyke. The second was The Thin Man, also starring William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Michael Mann has two hours to build his characters toward an emotional climax, and the gushing orchestra schmaltz lets you know he's trying, but when we get there the big pathos is borrowed wholesale from a little-remembered movie made 75 years ago: The best ten seconds of Public Enemies occur during the Biograph sequence when Manhattan Melodrama is briefly permitted to fill the screen in glorious black and white. Those few well-lit frames of Clark Gable evoke more sympathy, and the few frames of Myrna Loy inflict more heartbreak, than Mann is able to coax out of Depp, Bale and Cotillard in 140 minutes. Then we cut back to the Biograph audience and I shout, Get the fuck out of the way, Depp! I'm trying to watch William Powell's eyebrows!

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Back to the Boiler Room

Just learned that a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is slated for release next April. This is probably old news in the surrounding municipalities given that filming took place last month at Elk Grove and Hersey (!) high schools. The director has nothing but music videos to his credit, but let's not hold that against him; after all, guys like David Fincher and Spike Jonze got their start in the MTV biz. But here's the actual good news: The red-and-black sweater will be donned by Jackie Earle Fucking Haley.

I didn't bother with the Jason reboot for obvious reasons, but Haley has my trust.