tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83477182024-03-18T03:58:32.090-07:00VINYL IS HEAVYOpen your eyes, your ears, your nostrils: the weight is over.Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.comBlogger732125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-30503224617619655862011-12-24T09:00:00.001-08:002019-01-18T14:02:26.326-08:00BANG BANG: An Indexby Ryland Walker Knight<center><br />
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6469608203/" title="TALMADGE 1 by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7014/6469608203_3d793292ee.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="TALMADGE 1"></a><i><br />
— The Talmadge Memorial Bridge in <a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/sets/72157628314048481/">Savannah</a></i></center><br />
All this week we'll be running a series of year-end pieces by friends of the blog in a manner that, I trust, suits the blog and its character. That is, there weren't many rules. We just wanted to share our enthusiasms about a number of things that impressed us and helped each of us on our way to today, tomorrow, to 2012. Each post will be cross-published on Brian Darr's still-invaluable SF-centric cinephile blog, <i><b><a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com">Hell On Frisco Bay</a></b></i> not as a traffic generator but because he's my good buddy and we thought of this project together. It's also just fun to spread the wealth/love. So check back, subscribe, whatever. There will be daily updates to the feed and to this post in particular (as well as to Brian's blog). Until then, <i>bite your nails and eat your hearts out</i>.<br />
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<b>Crimmus Eve Update:</b> We're all done! Thanks for reading. Hope it was fun for you. It was fun to share. Merry Crimbo and a Happy New Year. Go see some movies!<center><br />
<a target="_blank" href="https://mianolting.com/Landscapes" title="horizon"><img src="https://freight.cargocollective.com/t/original/i/64887bef3e6afea04ba0554c11be39d072ae3f489f09ca9dada6f585d05da20d/landscape_02.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt=""></a><i><br />
— Mia is in South Africa, in <a target="_blank" href="http://vinylisheavy.tumblr.com/post/13878735202">Cape Town</a></i><br />
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<br />
THE RUN DOWN</B></center><ul><li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/u6eBFW">Adam Hartzell offers his top ten with commentary</a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/uAfDD0">Julian Tran and Cuyler Ballenger share six crime movies they loved seeing last year</a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/sMPRUk">Dave McDougall's selected 2011 discoveries, briefly noted and across various media</a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/thtmH0">Matthew Flanagan gives a quick rundown of stuff he loved from <i>last year</i></a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/ulQ8cP">Eric Freeman walks us through some things he found interesting in some things he saw this year</a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/tIjMFh">Akiva Gottlieb's got some love for <i><b>Poetry</b></i></a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/vXN1T7">Jenny Stewart offers notes on storytelling, and how <i><b>Breaking Bad</b></i>'s so good at it</a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/tAOIry">Durga Chew-Bose loves ladies</a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/vXlW6L">Ryland Walker Knight gabs on some stuff about impermanence</a><br />
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<li><a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/u5167Z">Brian Darr gives us 5 lists of 5 films</a><br />
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</ul>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com122tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-11615212402755850392011-12-23T07:00:00.004-08:002011-12-24T09:28:30.490-08:00BANG BANG: Brian Darr<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6564858197/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7033/6564858197_8507c7cd82.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt=""></a></center><br />5 x 5 by Brian Darr<br /><br />2011 was a year filled with terrible and wonderful things for me. When it comes to film-watching, there was plenty that fell into the "wonderful" category. My relationship with the cinema, and especially the "new" cinema, is constantly changing, and finding a way to put together a coherent top ten list encapsulation was more of a struggle for me than ever this year. So in true obsessive fashion, I've made a "modular" top ten, exploiting various quirks of eligibility that diehard list-watchers and -makers may recognize, but that everyone else can just read as an excuse for a nice round top 25.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6564858589/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7148/6564858589_492173b015.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt=""></a></center><br /><i>Five magnificent films that had a week-long "commercial" release in San Francisco in 2011. Definitely on my top ten list, no matter how you slice it.</i><br /><ul><li><b><i>Margaret</b></i> (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011) From the beautifully slo-mo opening sequence of Manhattanites in ritualized motion, reminiscent of James Benning's early collaborations with Bette Gordon, I suspected I was seeing something special. Drying my eyes during the closing credits, I knew for sure that I had. "You <i>will</i> weep and know why." If you've heard of this sprawling, 150-minute character drama about a teenager (Anna Paquin) struggling with every emotion under the sun in the wake of a traffic accident, you've probably also <a target="_blank" href="http://entertainment.time.com/2011/12/02/director-kenneth-lonergan-emerges-to-tell-us-hes-on-team-margaret/">heard</a> how it was given short shrift by a studio contractually obliged to release it but seemingly determined to take a loss on it. Though frustrations of the legal system is a sub-theme of the movie, (as are poetry, post-9/11 stress, burgeoning sexuality, opera, and a million other concerns) it's a shame that the story of <b><i>Margaret</b></i>'s belated and shoddy distribution has overshadowed all other discussions about the film. To be expected when prints disappear from theatres after a week or two, and perhaps reversible now that the film is re-opening at a Greenwich Village theatre today; I hope a Frisco Bay venue tries the same gambit soon.<br /></li><li><b><i><a target="_blank" href="http://vimeo.com/20925589">Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Part Lives</a></b></i> (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) Into the cave.<br /></li><li><b><i>The Tree of Life</b></i> (Terence Malick, 2011) Into the light. Multiple viewings and much ruminating have made its evident flaws insignificant in the face of its visionary design.<br /></li><li><b><i>A Dangerous Method</b></i> (David Cronenberg, 2011) Keira Knightley's polarizing performance in this impeccably composed, perfectly Cronenbergian film, led my way to a new understanding of my long-least favorite genre: the biopic. Historical figures perform specific functions for modern humans; why <i>not</i> allow actors to embody these functions by acting them out on screen? <br /></li><li><b><i>Certified Copy</b></i> (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010) It's a bit strange that the <a target="_blank" href=:"http://sffcc.org/main/">San Francisco Film Critics Circle</a> picked a largely English-language film for their 2011 Foreign Language Film award. I'll approve and attribute it to the masterful illusionism practiced by its Iranian director, its French star (Juliette Binoche), and the Tuscan countryside setting. All three create a mesmerizing surface beneath which there is even more to see, and contemplate. English-language films just don't <i>do</i> that, do they? Except for the exceptions.</ul></li><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6564858095/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7169/6564858095_b41569e833.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt=""></a></center><br /><i>Five superb films I saw in 2011 that screened in San Francisco for the first time this year. All had so-called "commercial" releases except the first one listed; it played for a week in New York but had only a handful of screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival here.</i><br /><ul><li><b><i><a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2011/05/sfiff54-day-11-arrival-of-train-at-la.html">The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu</a></b></i> (Andrei Ujica, 2010) "Look in my eyes; what do you see?...I'm the smiling face on your TV..." The past months have seen the final days of two of the world's most reviled dictators. We can hope, but not really expect, that they won't be replaced by others equally heinous somewhere in the world. But how often does tyranny conform to the images we expect from it? Such a question is at the center of this three-hour compilation of naked newsreel footage taken from the archives of the 1965-1989 Romanian leader's personal photographers. Kim Jong-il's father Kim Il-sung makes an astonishing cameo appearance.<br /></li><li><b><i>The Time That Remains</b></i> (Elia Suleiman, 2009) Palestinian director Suleiman applies the darkly absurdist, somewhat Tati-esque style he perfected in his previous film <i><b>Divine Intervention</b></i> to even more overtly autobiographical material. If its predecessor is any indication, it should only grow in my estimation with repeated viewings in the coming years.<br /></li><li><b><i>The Arbor</b></i> (Clio Barnard, 2010) A strange and remarkable work. The documentary tradition in theatre is long but little-known, so bringing some of its techniques for merging non-fiction material with acted performance into a cinematic sphere feels like a real breath of fresh air. It's particularly inspired in the service of its subject: the life and legacy of Yorkshire playwright Andrea Dunbar. <br /></li><li><b><i>The Skin I Live In</b></i> (Pedro Almodovar, 2011) I run hot and cold on Pedro's filmography, and had even skipped <b><i>Broken Embraces</b></i> after being disappointed by his previous two features. I'm back on board. Here, he forays into horror and science fiction without upsetting his delicate balance of telenovelistic melodrama and cinematic spectacle. To hint at why this film is something only Almodovar might have devised is to give too much of its plot away. I'll just say that maybe <b><i>Bad Education</b></i> could've been improved with a hint of Karl Freund's 1935 <b><i>Mad Love</b></i> in it.<br /></li><li><b><i>Inni</b></i> (Vincent Morisset, 2011) Is this monochromatic, visually experimental shadow box a new way forward for the concert film? If you prefer imagining the Icelandic band's sustains ricocheting against the back of a darkened concert hall rather than off beautiful mountains and lakes (as in 2007's <b><i>Heima</b></i>), then this is the Sigur Rós movie for you.</ul></li><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6564858465/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7144/6564858465_d520aaf5e5.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt=""></a></center><br /><i>Five beautiful films which I didn't see in 2011, but which were first publicly screened in San Francisco this year and were a big part of my conversations about cinema. Having seen them in 2010, I wish I'd made time to see them again when they played in local cinemas in 2011.</i><br /><ul><li><b><i><a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2011/04/sfiff54-day-4-useful-life.html">A Useful Life</a></b></i> (Federico Veiroj, 2010) I never had to see a Uruguayan film before this one to fall in love with this neorealist-goes-expressionist oratorio for that tiny country's cinema culture and one average man's place in it. And out of it.<br /></li><li><b><i><a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2011/04/sfiff54-day-3-coming-attractions.html">The Mysteries of Lisbon</b></a></i> (Raul Ruiz, 2010) A fitting swan song for one of the most mysterious filmmakers I know. The impossible-to-peg Chilean died in August but not before gracing us with a beautiful, sprawling adaptation of a novel by 19th-century Romantic Camilo Castelo Branco. (No, I hadn't heard of hm before either.) Dig those digital split diopter shots! <br /></li><li><b><i>Another Year</b></i> (Mike Leigh, 2010) The British misanthrope-or-is-he's most Ozu-esque film to date.<br /></li><li><b><i><a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2011/04/sfiff54-day-2-meeks-cutoff.html">Meek's Cutoff</a></b></i> (Kelly Reichardt, 2010) One of the American filmmakers best at portraying the so-called "outsiders" (or should I say the 99%?) of our modern society points her camera into history, showing us the stratifications found among a small community of pioneers heading West circa 1845.<br /></li><li><b><i>Essential Killing</b></i> (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2010) Just as exciting as <b><i>The Fugitive</b></i> except far more ambiguous and ambivalent about its moral position. Pure cinema.</ul></li><center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6564858369/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7021/6564858369_390297b4e3.jpg" width="500" height="237" alt=""></a></center><br /><i>Five terrific films that I saw at San Francisco festivals or other alternative venues in 2011, that have yet to secure "commercial" distribution in this country, as far as I am aware. In alphabetical, not preferential, order.</i><br /><ul><li><b><i>28.IV.81 (Descending Figures)</b></i> (Christopher Harris, 2011) A brightly-colored dual-projector comedy set amidst a Florida amusement park passion play where baseball caps mingle with Centurion helmets. <br /></li><li><b><i>Chantrapas</b></i> (Otar Iosseliani, 2010) Films about filmmaking are cinephile catnip, right? Well, this certainly trumps <b><i>The Artist</b></i> as an authentically moving tribute to a vanished mode of production left behind for a new life and search for meaning. <br /></li><li><b><i>Disorder</b></i> (Weikai Huang, 2009) Around Guangzhao in an hour. Dizzying in design, execution, imagery, editing style, and political audaciousness. Truly the closest thing to Dziga Vertov's vision for his kinoks the 21st Century has seen thus far in a single work.<br /></li><li><b><i><a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2011/04/sfiff54-day-6-hahaha.html">HaHaHa</a></b></i> (Hong Sangsoo, 2010) One of the funniest and most thought-provoking films from one of my favorite working directors. Need I say more?<br /></li><li><b><i>Lethe</b></i> (Lewis Klahr, 2009) Klahr's collage films can provide a closer look at vintage comic book art than even the most finicky collector is likely to take unless scrutinizing that line between "very fine" and "near mint". We see the visual DNA of colors and shading magnified, and at the same time we read between the panels, guided by the filmmaker's temporal and spatial dislocations. The standout of a strong set of new-ish work Klahr brought for local premieres this year, <b><i>Lethe</b></i> is a remix of a 1960s <i>Doctor Solar</i> story that becomes a noirish drama set to Gustav Mahler.</ul></li><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6564924693/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7157/6564924693_27244bca54.jpg" width="500" height="278" alt=""></a></center><br /><i>Five amazing films I saw in 2011 that have yet to screen publicly anywhere in San Francisco. In alphabetical, not preferential, order.</i><br /><ul><li><b><i>Almayer's Folly</b></i> (Chantal Akerman, 2011) Entrancingly old-fashioned adaptation of Joseph Conrad's first novel, transposed to stuck-in-time Cambodia.<br /></li><li><b><i>the Day He Arrives</b></i> (Hong Sangsoo, 2011) Is Hong's return to black-and-white cinematography, eleven years and as many films after Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, a sign that we should question the veracity of every scene, but this time around without a bifurcated structure to help guide us?<br /></li><li><b><i>Ghost Dance</b></i> (Mark Wilson, 2009) Named for the call to apocalyptic change performed by the Modoc (as beautifully described in Rebecca Solnit's book <i>River of Shadows</i>), this brief, but spectacularly ever-expanding animation recalls Eadweard Muybridge's own technological call for for a paradigm shift. <br /></li><li><b><i>Longhorn Tremelo</b></i> (Scott Stark, 2010) Begins and ends as a study of black shadows against mobile fields, but goes through a dazzling array of burnt-orange-and-white permutations in between. A version is viewable on <a target="_blank" href="http://vimeo.com/17262718">vimeo</a>, but I'd love to be able to see the full two-projector version somehow.<br /></li><li><b><i>The Turin Horse</b></i> (Bela Tarr, 2011) A Nietzche-inspired tour-de-force from one of the most forceful visions around.</ul></li><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6564822843/" title="THE DAY HE ARRIVES by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7003/6564822843_7e5ebabdd7_b.jpg" width="500" height="711" alt="THE DAY HE ARRIVES"></a></center><br /><i><br />____________________________<br /><br />Brian Darr lives in San Francisco, where he watches movies, though he's been known to travel for cinema as well. He blogs <a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/">here</a> and twitters <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/#!/HellOnFriscoBay">here</a>.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-75758859919111255092011-12-23T06:30:00.007-08:002011-12-24T09:34:35.707-08:00BANG BANG: Ryland Walker Knight<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6477644031/" title="Observations by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7029/6477644031_a971e61fb8.jpg" width="500" height="300" alt="Observations"></a></center><br />My, How Impermanent by Ryland Walker Knight<br /><br />Earlier this week my <a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/ujUm8R">Indiewire ballot</a> appeared. I still stand by it, I suppose, but even just a week after publication I itch to change things. In fact, the whole enterprise gives me hives to a certain degree. The whole idea of absolutes in general, in any context. If you take a look at that list, you'll see a collection of films, I'd wager, premised on contingency, or some form of mystery or mess or exuberance. Even the more "straight" narratives (Cronenberg's & Jacobs' portrait-films) exhibit an interest in how things do not fit, or ever fix into reliable—much less accepted, normal—forms. Perhaps the best term I can reduce this idea to is a favorite on this blog: navigation. Life's not a maze, but there are hurdles every day, including waking up, not to mention the unexpected tidal wave every so often. We're so used to the narratives we're given or that we give ourselves that eluding the unwanted can wreck a day, a month, a year. (Lucky me: my year saw hiccups and headaches but nothing got wrecked. Truth is, I had a fantastic year. And I'm grateful.) Naturally, I'm attracted to films about finding ways through life. <center><br />———</center><br />Finding a way to make movie-going more a part of my movie-watching has been difficult this year, the past couple years. Granted, I got to attend <a target="_blank" href="http://vinylisheavy.blogspot.com/search/label/Cannes%202011">Cannes</a>. But the pleasures of that were certainly "extracurricular" as much as within the <i>salles</i> and <i>theaters</i>. The dinners, the new friends, the jokes over whiskey and rosé with Danny and Adrian after long days. But I still cherish movie-going. <center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6558201267/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7167/6558201267_b1f338a3e4.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt=""></a></center><br />Early last week, in fact, I had the supreme pleasure to take in one of the best double bills in recent memory at the Roxie Theatre (with Brian, yes): the early show was Borzage's <i><b>Moonrise</b></i> followed by Renoir's first H'wood venture, the insanely under-seen and apparently under-recognized <i><b>Swamp Water</b></i>. Two films about the south made by not-southerners that understand the south and southerners in ways you rarely see anymore. (Of course, I'm not a southerner; I'm a Californian. My Okie roots are roots and my relationship to GA/SC is tertiary at best.) But aside from any obtuse anthropological/ethnological reading I can offer, the films exist and excel simply as films. Borzage's at his Murnau best and Renoir is at his dollies-everywhere (and "people as people") best. And they spoke to one another in delicious ways the way a double bill is supposed to work. Steve Seid usually knows what he's doing but this was a special program. The swamp has different narrative functions in the films, but in both the swamp is a hunting ground, a space of violence, something untamable that few can master or at least negotiate (or inhabit!). Again, this speaks to how I see the world at large. Life takes skills we never anticipate requiring, but nonetheless accrue. True to this optimism I harbor—inside an unavoidable but I hope healthy cynicism w/r/t life's obstacles, including people (above all people?)—both protagonists of these films find ways to join the world by their stories' ends.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6558213127/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7029/6558213127_14c6138f6e.jpg" width="500" height="275" alt=""></a></center><br />Then again, not every path is a success. The film I felt worst about leaving off my "official" top ten was Edward Yang's <i><b>A Brighter Summer Day</b></i>. That movie's all about the disconnect we're forced to confront as we grow through adolescence. It's about a lot more, too, including light, but there's a violence in adolescence that it understands (something Haz and I talk about as he is a teacher). This is true of all the Yang pictures I've seen, but this one is obviously special. Its length affords its narrative the space for us to observe characters rationalize their way through choices good and bad alike (though mostly bad) all the way. This is what critics mean when they call a film novelistic: time affording space for character. Granted, that's a limited view of what "the novel" is or can be, but this film in particular, as with many likewise classified films, is after a Dickensian kind of scope forever grounded in place and details. This, too, is how best to think of something like <i><b>Breaking Bad</b></i>, which Jen talked about <a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/vXN1T7">yesterday</a>. <br /><br />Television, after all, is serialized much how the early money-making novels were; both are strategized as much as constructed with plot doled out in delimited chunks. But, as Jen noted, one of the pleasures of <i><b>BB</b></i> is just how digressive it is, how much air time is given to behavior and go-nowhere episodes of bickering. And it's not like this show's hopeful. It's got a pretty grim take on human desire and nature and intelligence. As <a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/ow6uUa">I've said before</a>, these characters are idiots. Walter White seems to have figured out a few things watching Gus operate, like the cost of survival in such a dangerous game as the drug racket, but he's still a bald, selfish, myopic stranger to himself and his oh-so-beloved family by the end of this last season. And the person he's closest to has every reason in the world to want to slit his throat.<center><br />———</center><br />I've been using my <a target="_blank" href="http://vinylisheavy.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a> more than this home base throughout the year. Part of it is simply ease of use. Another is desire. The last is time. I like the scrapbook/notebook feel of the microblog. It feels like a repository of reminders. And it usually takes very little effort. Writing here is more work. (Writing anything is work!) Not sure what the new year will bring, but I'm not quite ready to quit my baby. But I quit making zines to make this blog and I may wind up quitting this blog to wind up making more films. Even if they're just little goofs about <a target="_blank" href="http://vimeo.com/26587928">the sounds of seagulls</a> or <a target="_blank" href="http://vimeo.com/32778780">odd poems about light and memory</a>. The future has more answers than me.<center><br />———<br /><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://lu-yi.blogspot.com/2011/04/is-that-all-there-is.html"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXTmGtDops6gKgvFwOz1Fn58DhPGTWcrBlRjGoUrzg-meLEGeiCMNVJv1kA07wqVnSC-P6ar9Z4V0fPrxqs83VmkzQRkID-fYc7zzP4S_OniMq4XkjoJA6T8xHPxo9EMefILD/s1600/Next+Entry+photos+by+Albert+Levy.jpg" width="500"></a></center><br />One thing I know for sure: though I've made some great friends via emails (cf. this week), there's a lot I'm proud of from this past year outside the walls and tubes of the internet. Thank you to everybody who helped make those realities real. You know who you are.<br /><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Ryland Walker Knight is a writer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He has three names, which you can read above, at left, and all over this blog.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-52004698975271644722011-12-22T07:00:00.009-08:002011-12-22T09:06:07.552-08:00BANG BANG: Durga Chew-Bose<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554235445/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7020/6554235445_28d1313e7d.jpg" width="500" height="410" alt=""></a></center><br />by Durga Chew-Bose<br /><br />I’ve been especially preoccupied with women this year. My desktop is a cluttered mess of young Michelle Pfeiffers and Diane Lanes, a spitfire-y Linda Manz, a pouty Tatum O’Neal, Elaine May, Gilda, Sissy and Shelley, Karen Black (multiple times), Cher with Winona, and screengrabs of Gena as Minnie. The young mother in Andrea Arnold’s short film, <i><b>Wasp</b></i>, is giving me the finger, Haydée Politoff, her back, Geraldine Chaplin and Monica Vitti seduce, smoke…seduce, and Bibi Andersson is beside herself. Marie-France Posier—who in an eerie way, congeals into "Laura Palmer"—is slouched in a bathtub, moon-eyed and fully-clothed, hair braided and boots dangling over the edge like a child who’s not quite sure how she got there or if she wants to get out. <br /><br />I should probably organize all of these pictures. Or at least drag them into a folder. But what’s the fun in that? I enjoy the distraction; their perpetual orbit, the familiarity. The delight of seeing Chiara Mastroianni and remembering the way she says “Ann-Gé-lah Bah-ssette” when ribbing about Emmanuelle Devos’ butt in Desplechin’s <i><b>Un conte de Noël</b></i>. Or even now as I write, on the top right corner of my screen, Diane Keaton’s Kay Adams is smiling: red dress and sun hat, she’s listening as Michael tells her to eat her spaghetti while he spins a story about Luca Brasi.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6522225519/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7165/6522225519_8a32f12e46.jpg" width="498" height="379" alt=""></a></center><br />Barbara Loden’s <i><b>Wanda</b></i> aired on TCM in the fall. I watched it twice in a row—the first time completely crushed but immediately devoted; the second time, with a pen and my notebook. I jotted down images and words that drew near in the way some movies—the most pressing ones—appear to come from somewhere itchy inside me. I also copied dialogue; harmless in print, vivid, near wicked on screen. Like how credulously Wanda asks at a dive bar if “[She] can borrow a comb,” or how promptly a patron spots her sitting alone with no money and says, “I’ll take care of <i>this</i>.” I scribbled stuff like “washed-up cheerleader ponytail,” “WOOLWORTH’S parking lot,” “Mabel Longhetti, Rayette Dipesto…” “pincushion top bun, hand resting on forehead as cigarette burns,” “sitting in back of empty bus,” “sits with knees up at movie theater,” “follows instructions!!!” Soon after, I wrote about the film and Loden, and her marriage to Elia Kazan for <a target="_blank" href="http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/9/12/in-which-what-made-it-special-made-it-dangerous.html">This Recording</a>. <center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554180983/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7012/6554180983_bb4d35c588_z.jpg" width="500" height="616" alt=""></a></center><br />At least twice a month this year I watched the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkRZTEk-mkM">same YouTube clip</a>: a 1974 episode of the Dick Cavett Show with guest Lucille Ball. Cavett’s hair looks two days short of a haircut and Lucille is wrapped in a brown Muppet-trimmed jacket. Her legs are crossed away from him, impassive as if sitting at a coffee shop one table over. She turns her torso only slightly to answer his questions, as if saying, “Why are you talking to me?” It’s incredible. But when Cavett recalls the time a Marx brother appeared on her show, Lucille melts. Her eyes roll back as she says his name—“Haaaaaarpo." Pure piety. As Dick sets up the clip, Lucille falls back into her sad clown state, burrowing in her feathers, only to jump at any chance to honor her friend; a "darling man." Mimicking the famous mirror scene in Duck Soup, Lucy, dressed as Harpo, surprises him and matches his every move. Two Harpos. Two distressed top-hats. Two bulb horns. Out-and-out laughs. My face gets mangled with cheer each time.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554181281/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7159/6554181281_90060b81e8.jpg" width="500" height="252" alt=""></a></center><br />Mia Hansen-Løve makes moments on screen that I'd like to elope with. Her 2009 feature, <i><b>Le père de mes enfants</b></i>, plucks ornament from the everyday—the way three daughters occupy adult spaces, a father's unexpected helplessness, adolescent agonies, a parent's things—and her follow-up, <i><b>Un amour de jeunesse</b></i>, kindly plots the elaborate confusion and spectacle of first love and teenage heartbreak. It screened once at IFC and I made sure to see it. <center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554181101/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7144/6554181101_84b92f98c4.jpg" width="500" height="300" alt=""></a></center><br />Teenagers, especially French girls, are terrifically soulful characters. Like Sandrine Bonnaire's Suzanne or Virginie Ledoyen as Christine in <i><b>L'eau Froide</b></i>, they are rash, sneaky, jumpy, and dip into dark bouts of misery or big dopey loves. Hansen-Løve (who too, looks eternally adolescent and slightly anonymous like a face in a found passport photo) perfectly maneuvers teenage girl unrest. Tethered to a boy who leaves her, Camille (Lola Creton) undergoes grueling grief—inexplicably endless when we're young. But before that—and what Hansen-Løve does so well—Romance is breathless, braless, a series of grand gestures and promises that bank on time never ticking. In one scene, Camille and Sullivan are in the country experiencing an afternoon cold war; she upstairs in bed moping, he outside, somewhere. He returns with food and cooks dinner for the two of them. Later, Camille stumbles downstairs and slides into her chair. She has one bite before slowly crawling across the table's bench which separates them and nudges her head into his neck. All is forgotten, for now. The audience knows that this brief moment of peace is bittersweet and that we cannot will it to last longer. <br /><br />And finally, here are bits from a November 1993 PREMIERE piece, <i>She’s Done Everything (except direct)</i> by Rachel Abramowitz, about Polly Platt, a woman I truly admire. When she died on July 27th, I read everything I could find on her life.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554107243/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7166/6554107243_33ea161292.jpg" width="500" height="350" alt=""></a></center><blockquote>"Tonight she seems quite ebullient, charged up by her recent discovery of two young filmmakers from Texas… <i><b>Bottle Rocket</b></i> makes her giddy….'If I were young, I’d give up everything -boyfriend, home- and go to Texas and beg these guys to let me work on their movie.'<br /><br />…<br /><br />"Still, when her ex-husband picks up, all her expansiveness vanishes. She seems to contract into an almost fetal position. Her voice becomes tight, careful. The conversation has a ritualistic quality: all the habits of intimacy, but no longer the trust. She treats him as if he were fragile, thanking him for the flowers he sent her, babying him with the good buzz she’s heard about his latest venture. She tells him about <i><b>Bottle Rocket</b></i>. 'It’s in Texas and there’s no Larry McMurtry, but it has a bit of the feel of <b><i>The Last Picture Show</i></b>, she says. She asks him to talk to PREMIERE about her. He refuses. 'I’ve been talking all these fucking years about you!' she erupts."<br /><br />...<br /><br />"One year later, they packed their meager belongings into a car, along with Platt’s one-eyed dog, Puppy, and set out for L.A., where they soon befriended the auteurs they worshiped. One night, Howard Hawks took the pair out for dinner, along with a beautiful young starlet from Rio Lobo named Sherry Lansing. Toward the end of the meal, Lansing decided to visit the ladies’ room. 'She stood up, and she was gorgeous. And I was not,' says Platt. 'Peter and Howard watched her. She walked to the bathroom, and I remember having Howard on my right and Peter on my left, and their eyes were following her.' As Lansing disappeared from view, Platt recalls, Hawks leaned across her and said, ‘Peter, now that is the kind of girl that you should be with.’ I remember thinking, It’s like I don’t exist.'"<br /><br />…<br /><br />"One summer while the children were with Bogdanovich, Platt drank seventeen cases of beer and wrote <i><b>Pretty Baby</b></i>."<br /><br />…<br /><br />"After sending other emissaries, Brooks asked her personally to produce <i><b>Broadcast News</b></i>, which she did. Her all-around dedication to the project renewed her legend for telling detail. Brooks had wanted <i><b>Broadcast News</b></i>’ key color to be red; now he was shooting the schoolyard scene where the young Aaron is getting beaten up. He looked up and saw the woman who fifteen years ago had removed the E from a TEXACO sign; she was down on her knees, painting a red accent line on a staircase. 'If you were putting together a baseball team, this is the person you’d kill for,' says Albert Brooks, who played the adult Aaron. 'She can play any position. She can hit; she can pitch.'"<br /><br />…<br /><br />"'There are times when I hear Jim talk that I experience something that is so much worse than the jealousy that I felt toward Cybill. I am so envious of his ability to think and express himself that I think I’m going to die. I totally identify with Salieri [in <i><b>Amadeus</b></i>], because when he picks up Mozart’s music and starts talking about how brilliant it is, I feel like that’s me. But I don’t have any desire to destroy Jim or Peter or anybody.'"</blockquote><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554248871/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7033/6554248871_d66eb35c7b.jpg" width="500" height="314" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Durga Chew-Bose is a writer living in Brooklyn. She twitters <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/durgapolashi">here</a> and tumbls <a target="_blank" href="http://durgapolashi.tumblr.com">here</a>.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-63437596944698104522011-12-22T06:30:00.002-08:002011-12-22T07:49:26.522-08:00BANG BANG: Jenny Stewart<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554027791/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7023/6554027791_8ba97d8cfa.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><b>Breaking</b></i> by Jennifer K Stewart<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Even though television serials are the right medium with which to tell immersive character stories, it is still a pretty rare thing to see a show that isn’t primarily plot-driven. What I mean is that our usual (pedestrian mainstream) experience in front of the screen is to be very quickly clued into certain archetypical/idealized characters, so that we may watch said characters react to a series of events (loosely, ‘plot’). Nothing explains this better than the <i><b>Hangover </b></i><span style="font-style: normal;">movies, where the whole point is to watch oh-so-subtly differentiated dudes responding to outrageous events. Note that </span><i><b>Hangover</b></i><span style="font-style: normal;">’s reverse chronology is just the ideal cinematic contrivance for getting the audience to salivate in anticipation of immanent character reactions. We want to see that guy </span><i>being that guy</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, etc.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">And really, I shouldn’t be smug or cynical, because at the very least, all these structural conventions (i.e. beginning the film at its chronological end) are interesting, if only insofar as they get allied to other generic conventions (the dude movie, etc.) Film itself mentors us into reading character and personality <i>as popular film conventions have conceived them</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. A show begins by showing us just enough characterization to clarify precisely what the character will experience and exactly how s/he will </span><i>and</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> will not change (ex: The Godfather trilogy), so that we may watch a certain stability of who they truly are prevail through all happenstance/fantastical events. This film shorthand for characterization is itself highly formulaic, though it can still be interesting or even original – think of how </span><i><b>There Will Be Blood</b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"> showed you who Daniel Plainview is through his incredibly tense and impatient dealings with Paul/Eli Sunday. The innovation being that Plainview was too horrifying to be legibly revealed all at once, and his character so graphically linked with the confusion of blood and oil (insights for another essay never written, alas). </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6212932415/" title="Motor skills by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6235/6212932415_fbbe5c1279.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt="Motor skills"></a></center><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Anyhow, that this kind of storytelling continues to prevail – namely, 1. introduction of characters 2. embroil characters in plot machine so we can see them being themselves OR turning inevitably into who we suspect they are to be – is easily explained by how much we enjoy watching eccentric, essentialized, and/or idealized personalities undergo life and its passions. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The past couple years, I’ve been thinking about how the advent of great serial television series has allowed groundbreaks from this tradition. Pretty simply, serials have the requisite time in which to do so. Even a film trilogy has such limited space within which to upset the normal character/plot formula. This is because most of the disruptive work requires defamiliarizing who it was you thought was on screen, and a two-hour film simply hasn’t the time to lay groundwork. Imagine trying to make a <i><b>Breaking Bad</b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"> movie capable of showing any of the central characters (Skyler, Jessie, Gus, Walt Jr, Marie, and Hank, let alone Walter). Disastrous. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6547429139/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7167/6547429139_809cb80a91.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt=""></a></center><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b>Breaking Bad</b></i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is doing something subtle and thrilling. Think of how cursory the ‘plot’ is – nothing </span><i>just happens</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, all events are a precipitated by complex backmoves and antecedents between combinations of characters, and virtually all of these on-the-fly miracles of impulse in the face of struggle and resistance from others. Even Walt’s vainglorious inability to let Hank mistake Gale for Heisenberg owes to the same uncertainty principle (right?) as rashly swerving into traffic to keep Hank from Gus’ laundry. If there is anything predictable about Walt, it is that he finds himself – much to his own horror – capable of unpredictability. It is neither characteristic nor uncharacteristic, and this is what the show has been demonstrating from the start. Consider Walt’s tortured and circumambulating dispensing of Krazy-8 in the early episodes of Season One. Attempting to, oh, rationally persuade himself to murder the drug dealer bike-locked by the neck in Jessie’s basement, Walt composes a pro versus con list whilst sitting on the toilet. But it took a sandwhich, a fall down the stairs, and a shattered plate shard in Walt’s leg; committed decision not being enough, he needed a chance for reactive adrenaline. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Note how Skyler’s resolve against Walt was at first backed by steadfast principle, only to then just wear away. She seizes upon the delusion that good (paying for Hank’s rehabilitation) justifies the means. Welcomes it even, so that the war of attrition is over and she need no longer resist. On any other show, once established that her character stood for any principled stance, there’d be no need to show any more of her. Instead, she breaks, just like everyone else on <i><b>Breaking Bad</b></i><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554027981/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7024/6554027981_72f55ced8d.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt=""></a></center><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">By the end of 2011’s fourth season, we can see Walt’s now refined ability to premeditate complex manipulations on equal par with Gus. Yet recall the heartbreaking scene between Walt and his son in S04E10, “Salud.” It’s the morning after Walt and Jessie’s physical fight. Junior’s calling and buzzing as Walt, disorientated, medicated, beaten, pulls back a sheet stuck to his face with dried blood. The shroud comes away for a few precious minutes and Junior sees his dad unguarded. At first Walt sticks to the story – “don’t tell your mother, I was gambling, can we just keep this between us?” – but when Junior asks <i>who did you get into a fight with</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that’s the end of Walt’s posturing. Walt sees Jessie where Junior is; the possibility of relief, forgiveness. But as sobriety dawns Walt takes it all back and the layers of blood-caked cover go back on. Now Walt asks Junior not for connection and forgiveness, but to promise to </span><i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> take that unshrouded image as defining; the way the “empty spray-paint can” imagine of his rasping father dying of Huntington’s disease, is Walt’s only “real memory” of his father. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">W: “I don’t want that to be your memory of me when I’m gone.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">Jr: “Remembering you that way wouldn’t be so bad. The bad way to remember you would be the way you’ve been this whole last year. At least last night, you were real. Y’know?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Walt is confusing the revelation of nothing beneath the shroud with emptiness. RJ Mitte kinda steals this scene, and Walt junior is now the character to watch in Season Five… </div><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6554027861/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7163/6554027861_cf7d837a99.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt=""></a></center><br />p.s. Jessie. No one’s been broken more than Jessie, in ways he has yet to fully discover.<br /><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Jennifer K Stewart is a philosopher and yoga instructor living in Canada. She believes in the body.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-71676414377504858012011-12-21T07:00:00.009-08:002011-12-21T07:00:06.048-08:00BANG BANG: Akiva Gottlieb<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6546685109/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7154/6546685109_93291cf556.jpg" width="500" height="364" alt=""></a></center><br />by Akiva Gottlieb<br /><br />The movie I most wanted to evangelize for all year—at least before <i><b><a target="_blank" href="http://www.change.org/petitions/fox-searchlight-make-margaret-available-to-us-critics-and-other-pertinent-voting-bodies#">Margaret</a></b></i> started kicking down doors—was usually synopsized in embarrassing fashion. Lee Chang-dong’s <i><b>Poetry</b></i>, in prose courtesy of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1287878/">IMDb</a>: “A sixty-something woman, faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime and in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, finds strength and purpose when she enrolls in a poetry class.” Yes, every word of this heartwarming short story is technically accurate, but the implied causality is almost willfully misleading. In actuality, her discovery of the heinous crime is sublimated, her awareness of her Alzheimer’s is either denied or forgotten, and if she finds strength and purpose when enrolling in a poetry class, it’s not the result of anything she learns there. <br /><br />The perverse irony of this unpredictable, quietly devastating film is Lee’s framing of his protagonist’s terminal illness as less of an impediment than an enabler—it causes her to forget, but just as crucially <i>gives her license</i> to walk away from trauma. <i><b>Poetry</b></i>’s most resonant mysteries pivot upon the impossibility of knowing the difference between a selective memory and a faulty one.<br /><br />Lee’s film is an object lesson in everyday escapism, and if he never indicts the movies as our favorite emotional management tool, he probably expects we’d repress that knowledge anyway. <i><b>Poetry</b></i> draws a precise visual map of those other places we hide from what we don’t want to know—behind locked doors, under the covers, in the shower, in a karaoke bar, in a poem—and the negotiations we’re willing to make with ourselves and others to keep an ugly truth from coming to light. This is not a chronicle of disease and triumph, or finding one’s voice, but a testimonial to compartments and evasions. <i><b>Poetry</b></i>’s poetry lessons allegorize the process of emotional disengagement as a method of scaling back, limiting one’s scope, concentrating. To repress one memory might just be way of focusing more intensely on another. A debilitating illness is a tragedy, but <i><b>Poetry</b></i> discovers a state of grace—or at least a deferral of inevitabilities—in being lost for words.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6546684909/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6546684909_283a5e3a04.jpg" width="500" height="364" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Akiva Gottlieb writes about film for <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/akiva-gottlieb">The Nation</a>, but does not write poetry. He lives in Michigan.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-86528044270929460392011-12-21T06:30:00.011-08:002011-12-21T06:46:23.938-08:00BANG BANG: Eric Freeman<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6547402205/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7026/6547402205_9ab72a88de.jpg" width="500" height="268" alt=""></a></center><br />Some Things I Found Interesting in Some Things I Saw This Year by Eric Freeman<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6547402071/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7013/6547402071_5ef8b404ff.jpg" width="500" height="311" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><b>A Brighter Summer Day</b></i> (dir. Edward Yang): I saw this in January at a mostly empty screening with no intermission in Berkeley, and it’s still probably the best thing I’ve seen all year, old or new. Read <a target="_blank" href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/exiles-in-modernity/Content?oid=894839">Rosenbaum's longer piece</a> if you want more comprehensive breakdown. I’ll just note that what strikes me about <i><b>ABSD</b></i> (and <i><b>Yi Yi</b></i>, as well) is that the epic scope follows not from stunning natural vistas or loud pronouncements of import, as we’ve come to expect from the medium, but finding an interesting situation and treating the context and its characters with complete respect and as much depth as necessary. It’s an epic because it’s so true to the way people relate to one another.<br /><br /><i><b>World on a Wire</b></i> (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder): If <i><b>ABSD</b></i> is the best movie I saw this year, then this one has proven to have fascinated me the most. It was my first Fassbinder, and since then I’ve steadily run through a good chunk of his career. One thing I love about this one, apart from the “what if we shot through four panes of glass?” aesthetic, is how RWF sets up shots where a pan finishes in a hilariously overdetermined setup. It’s the movie in microcosm: things may appear free-flowing, but everything has been decided already.<br /><br /><i><b>Martha Marcy May Marlene</b></i> (dir. Sean Durkin): A disappointment even as I enjoyed it, if only because it’s so easy to see how it could be better. While the structure is indeed very clever, many of the match cuts fall flat because it’s immediately when and where the scenes take place. As the last shot proves, Durkin wants the audience to identify with Martha’s displacement, yet continually keeps her at remove. Which is all a way of saying that the film needs more moments of actual ambiguity, like the several shots of Martha walking through a dark hall, when it’s unclear where she is until she ends up in a room she herself might not have expected to enter.<br /><br /><i><b>Certified Copy</b></i> (dir. Abbas Kiarostami): Ryland thinks this film is fundamentally a work of criticism, and I mostly agree with that statement. But I also think it comes across as more dismissive than it should, because in this case the criticism gets at important points about how relationships change over time, the value of authenticity in everything from art to interactions, and all sorts of other deep philosophical questions that we tend not to consider on a daily basis. So, yes, it’s criticism, but also proof that criticism isn’t really about the thing it directly addresses, but deeper conceptions and feelings about how people relate to the world around them.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6547402469/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7025/6547402469_1068b4033f.jpg" width="500" height="302" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><b>Mildred Pierce</b></i> (dir. Todd Haynes): It’s no surprise that a director who regularly gets great performances from actresses does so well with Kate Winslet, who plays this role as a mix of her usual technical strength and the rare looseness usually lacking in her most awarded work. What’s less expected is that Evan Rachel Wood acquits herself so well. Veda can easily come off as a monster, but Wood instills her with enough relatable pride to seem human. Her best moment (and also the one that will make me seem particularly pervy for noting) comes when, directly after Mildred finds out about the affair with Monty, Veda gets out of bed fully naked, struts over to her vanity, and regards herself in the mirror, all as a sort of victory celebration after embarrassing her mother. It’s a triumphant moment for the character, the point at which she believes to have finally proven herself as a dominant woman. For different reasons, the scene makes the same case for the actress.<br /><br /><i><b>Drive</b></i> (dir. Nicholas Winding Refn): I’m of the camp that takes this movie as a massive spastic fuckup, mostly because NWR has no idea what he was trying to do and not for some difficulty in melding tones and styles. But there are some delightful moments of clarity, especially the opening set-piece and the various music videos (not like music videos) that distill the latent emotions of the piece into perfect pairings of image and sound. For all the talk of <i><b>Drive</b></i> as an arthouse action movie, the best parts are almost always the most overtly commercial.<br /><br /><i><b>Rango</b></i> (dir. Gore Verbinski): It’s become standard in some circles to say that the home-viewing experience is almost as good as the theater these days, but <i><b>Rango</b></i> is the first movie that ever made me think it could be true. I loved the movie in March, mostly for its gag-a-minute pace, but I don’t think I fully appreciate the visual dazzle until I saw it on the very excellent Blu-Ray transfer on a reasonably-sized TV. Multiplex projection standards are so poor that, for a detail-driven, wide-audience movie like this one, it’s almost preferable to watch it on a couch.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6547402401/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7168/6547402401_fc88f42aaf.jpg" width="500" height="207" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><b>Bridesmaids</b></i> (dir. Paul Feig): As the thinkpieces all said, an important step forward for the status of women in Hollywood comedies. Unfortunately, the movie itself is a sad commentary on exactly what those Hollywood comedies entail. Almost all the best parts are moments of emotional discord between Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph or throwaway lines from the amazing Melissa McCarthy -- the worst are the zany, insert-setpiece-here laugh-generators that could have been ported in from any Apatowville (or, worse yet, Farrelly Bros) creation. Turn this into a movie about adult friendship with regular laughs, and it might have felt a little more true to its characters. Instead, it’s all too familiar.<br /><br /><i><b>Enlightened</b></i> (created by Mike White and Laura Dern): This HBO series isn’t especially cinematic, but it deserves mention on this list for Laura Dern’s performance as Amy Jellicoe, in my opinion the best acting work of the year. It’s easy to caricature Amy—the pilot arguably does it too often—as a hypocritical woman who believes herself to have found inner peace when she falls victim to the same sort of jealousies and grudges she did before getting a few weeks of new-age counseling. In Dern’s hands, however, Amy is fascinatingly complicated, oblivious enough to peacock a new friend in front of past confidants but introspective enough to acknowledge that pettiness a few hours later. In a TV landscape heavy on melodrama, <i><b>Enlightened</b></i> stands out as a series about the everyday difficulties of trying to be a better person in a world that tends to incentivize the opposite behavior. It’s about self-awareness and emotional processes, and those battles register on Dern’s face as often as they manifest in an external conflict.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6547402131/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7174/6547402131_0165e47dfc.jpg" width="500" height="270" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Eric Freeman writes regularly about sports at <a target="_blank" href="http://theclassical.org">The Classical</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie?author=Eric+Freeman">Ball Don’t Lie</a>, and intermittently elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/freemaneric">@freemaneric</a>.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-72205856325474561692011-12-20T07:00:00.003-08:002011-12-20T18:16:03.718-08:00BANG BANG: Matthew Flanagan<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><br /><br />by Matthew Flanagan<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6529654225/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7003/6529654225_a69bc147c4.jpg" width="500" height="368" alt=""></a></center><br />I seem to be roughly a year behind with everything at the moment, so will have to shirk the brief here and recall films I saw in and from 2010 instead. Perhaps that’s best: reflecting on a year too soon tends not to leave enough time for its patterns and convergences to emerge, if they are to. A few neat couplings from 2010: films about the sea and its displacement of capital (trade and gold) — <i><b>The Forgotten Space</b></i>, <i><b>Film socialisme</b></i>; gentle forest fictions — <i><b>Yuki & Nina</b></i>, <i><b>Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives</b></i>; the past and present of American cities — <i><b>Get Out of the Car!</b></i>, <i><b>Cold Weathe</b></i>r; sharp, lucid digital films, shot for love and little money — Saskia Gruyaert, Raya Martin, Antoine Thirion’s <i><b>Tales</b></i> & Gina Telaroli’s <i><b>A Little Death</b></i>; and, loosely, Daïchi Saïto’s <i><b>Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis</b></i> & Richard Skelton’s LP <i><b>Landings</b></i>. There were other films of note — Thomas Arslan’s <i><b>In the Shadows</b></i>, Sharon Lockhart’s <i><b>Double Tide</b></i>, Jean-Claude Rousseau’s <i><b>Festival</b></i>, Nathaniel Dorsky’s sublime <i><b>Compline</b></i> & <i><b>Aubade</b></i> — but, in all, two favourites: Liu Jiayin’s <i><b>607</b></i> and Patrick Keiller’s <i><b>Robinson in Ruins</b></i>.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6529654171/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7150/6529654171_7d91f4a9a5.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt=""></a></center><br />Liu’s <i><b>Oxhide II</b></i> (2009) is, in its small way, an extraordinary structural film, but I think I like the lesser-known <i><b>607</b></i> more. It’s an ostensibly minimalist work: a single, 16-minute shot (followed by three brief dissolves) of clear water in a wooden bathtub: a quiet, almost serene, space, just theatrical enough. The actors are Liu’s hands and those of her mother and father, a porcelain fish, a few bobbing mushrooms and the disruptions of the water line. That’s all. The hands tease and hook each other, and it seems most movements exist for their sound: ripples breaking and bubbles tearing the surface. A minor, playful film, and the most pleasurable of recent memory.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6529654487/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7173/6529654487_ed15176a52.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><b>Robinson in Ruins</b></i> was first screened here in the UK at LFF on the 19th and 21st of October, the days immediately before and after what was probably the year’s defining domestic event: the announcement of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/spending-review">the CSR</a>, a structural adjustment programme aimed at permanently altering the role of the welfare state in British society. Keiller’s film was shot between January and November of 2008, documenting that year’s financial crisis before the cost of its systemic collapse was transformed into the class project of austerity. Its study of mostly agrarian, bucolic spaces — connected by a network of military bases, oil pipelines and sites of social unrest — questions, laterally, the autonomy of our landscape by way of a biophilic inventory of flowers, plants, trees and a few animals. With this shift in focus, <i><b>Robinson in Ruins</b></i> leaves behind the urban and (increasingly invisible) sites of industrial activity in <i><b>London</b></i> (1994) and <i><b>Robinson in Space</b></i> (1997), and that geography is remapped instead in Owen Hatherley’s superb book <i><b><a target="_blank" href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/534-a-guide-to-the-new-ruins-of-great-britain">A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain</a></b></i>, published concurrently. Hatherley’s book is a more pointed analysis of the abject failure of the neoliberal project, and together with <i><b>Robinson in Ruins</b></i> offers a vital base to reflect on the point of transition at which we find ourselves: wondering whether the CSR signals a permanent reentrenchment of neoliberalism amidst crisis (seemingly, its natural state), or whether the strain of underwriting its collapse will prove too much for the vestiges of democratic capitalism to bear. This year, we’ve watched as the locus of what began to unravel in 2008 has shifted from the US, via the UK, to the most intertwined states of Europe, and it’s likely one particular sequence from 2011 could prove prophetic: the end of Christoph Hochhausler’s high-finance art movie <i><b><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.de/Unter-dir-Stadt-Nicolette-Krebitz/dp/B005I0F3KO/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1320315006&sr=1-1">The City Below</a></b></i> and its hushed final retreat: “<i>…it’s begun</i>.” Hatherley’s book ends its dérive in Liverpool amidst one of the most striking visible corpses of the Blairite redevelopment project: the few lonely cultural and residential substitutes for deindustrialisation at the heart of its docks, the thinnest of economic and social hopes. We visited Liverpool on the second to last day of 2010, and, picking out some lights on the other side of the Mersey, the immediate future looked pretty bleak. This year, it’s bleaker still.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6529654297/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7175/6529654297_b78efc52fe.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt=""></a></center><br /><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Matthew Flanagan lives in the UK and blogs sometimes at <a target="_blank" href="http://landscapesuicide.blogspot.com">his blog</a>.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-44255975142038822042011-12-20T06:30:00.002-08:002011-12-21T11:15:19.554-08:00BANG BANG: Dave McDougall<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/a_harrowing_historic_week_in_e.html"><img src="http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/egypt20211/bp41.jpg" width="500"></a></center><br />Selected 2011 discoveries, briefly noted and across various media by Dave McDougall.<center><br />———<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513804773/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7027/6513804773_11d7ef67b5.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt=""></a></center><br /><b><i>Homeland</i></b> —— the characters on this show run deep; their history and demons are as much a driver as the twists of plot. Which certainly helps Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin and Damian Lewis and Morena Baccarin act their asses off. Allegiances don't shift as much as they are gradually revealed; even though the audience isn't only in the headspace of Danes' rebellious CIA agent, everything is filtered through the line between the watchers and the suspects, and the further into each world we're given access, the more complicated the line between terrorist and hero. This isn't a war of ideas as much as a war between wounded people who've sided with ideas, and those wounds are what drive both the terrorists and those trying to stop them. This week's showstopping season finale toyed with heavy political and personal dénouement and teased an even greater moral complexity to come. If there's a better show on television right now, I'd like to see it. <br /><br /><b><i>The Color Wheel</i></b> (Alex Ross Perry, 2011) —— A masterpiece, a perfect screwball comedy, and a vicious, misanthropic, prickly little thing. <a target="_blank" href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-lower-depths-alex-ross-perry-and-the-color-wheel">What Ignatiy said</a>, and then some. <center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6515861827/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7175/6515861827_1568c6b515.jpg" width="500" height="354" alt=""></a></center><br />And two other filmic masterpieces-to-be-named-later that also tackle communication (and shared histories) between men and women, on which I'll have more to say in the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mubi.com/notebook">Mubi</a> year-end roundup.<center><br />———</center><br />Governments toppled, not by social media but by people going to the streets to battle for their due. But the dynamics of open source protest and new media communication flows were a big part of why this was the year that kicked off an #ArabSpring, an indignado movement, a global coalition of #Occupy protests. It's not just coordination of protests but the ability for knowledge flows to reveal the silent political preferences of a people, and to rally supporters to the cause. None of these movements were created by the emergence of social media -- all grew out of previous organization by activists on the ground, over years and decade -- but it's hard to deny that these movements could only coalesce through communication, and that new forms of one-to-many communication smooth the friction of reaching out to wide audiences. <center><br />———</center><br />As the 2008 financial crisis has shifted to become a crisis of solvency and liquidity in the Eurozone, the economic intelligence of the left-ish political blogotwittersphere rises almost as fast as events shift; but the key insight is that, unlike the people-powered movements and revolutions mentioned above, the fate of all of our economic lives still hangs in the balance of deals to be cut in back rooms by power brokers. Which, as those same movements will attest, is the opposite of democracy. If the revolutions of Egypt or Libya or Tunisia (or Syria or Bahrain or Yemen, if you're looking for revolutions-in-the-making) were best revealed by the participants themselves in 140 characters (or 140 character updates, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/tweets-from-tahrir/">compiled</a>), then the stories of our economic dilemmas have been best told by those savvy enough to get to the bottom of capital flows and reveal these inner workings via blogs, articles, and interviews, whose links were embedded in 140-character updates themselves. Information, in all its forms -- pictures, videos, charts, analysis, stories from the front lines -- move and flicker and flow just the ways frames do in the cinema. For me, these were a few of the sources that made the leap to essential in 2011, from the MENA uprisings to the Econopocalyse and the social movements pushing back:<ul><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/">Al Jazeera's live stream</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/#!/blakehounshell">@blakehounshell</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23jan25">#Jan25</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23sidibouzid">#Sidibouzid</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/paulmason/">Paul Mason's blog</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.zerohedge.com/">ZeroHedge</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23OWS">#OWS</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/#!/OccupyArrests">@OccupyArrests</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb/13012333374">NNT's Facebook</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/#!/umairh">@umairh</a><br /></li><li><a target="_blank" href="http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com">zunguzungu</a> / <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/#!/zunguzungu">@zunguzungu</a></li></ul><center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6515861887/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7151/6515861887_cc43fc77c0.jpg" width="500" alt=""></a><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6515861969/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7150/6515861969_ec06e41e00.jpg" width="500" alt=""></a><br /><br />———</center><br />Among all the books and blogs and analysis, an epic cornerstone of how to even begin to think of how we got here — David Graeber's <i><a target="_blank" href="http://mhpbooks.com/books/debt/">Debt: The First 5000 Years</a></i>. <i><br />________________________________<br /><br />David McDougall is a writer, filmmaker, and media strategist based in London and Los Angeles. He's got blogs and films and words in various places, some of them on the internet. He twitters <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/dmcdougall">here</a>.</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-1689706273314257792011-12-19T07:00:00.003-08:002011-12-20T18:16:34.786-08:00BANG BANG: Julian Tran + Cuyler Ballenger<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_Blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513706619/" title="The Man Who Hijacked The World by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7150/6513706619_37647ddfcd_z.jpg" width="500" height="740" alt="The Man Who Hijacked The World"></a></center><br />Julian Tran and Cuyler Ballenger Present: <b>Crime</b><br /><br />Netflix doubled our monthly fee this year. What a crime. Here are the best crime movies we saw on Netflix this year.<center><br /><a target="_Blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513671787/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7170/6513671787_d9987532f9.jpg" width="500" height="213" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>1. <i>Carlos (Mini-Series)</i>, 2010, Olivier Assayas.</b> <b><i>Carlos</i></b> is an interesting movie because the entire six hours is comprised of five repeating scenes: Cars driving up to a place; Johnny Walker Red being consumed; Shooting into a ceiling with an automatic weapon; Deboarding planes; The Cure. Because of, not despite, this simplicity, Carlos is irresistible, like (see picture). Don’t let the six hour running time dissuade you – Assayas burns through scenes with the naïve recklessness of a true Marxist. In a good way.<center><br /><a target="_Blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513671827/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7018/6513671827_7e700cfd2c.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>2. <i>The Robber (Der Räuber)</i>, 2010, Benjamin Heissenberg.</b> Further proof that rich people run. Madoff probably ran 5 miles, 5 days a week, before going into the office and robbing half the eastern seaboard. <b><i>The Robber</i></b> runs before and after his job. He also amasses a sizeable fortune, although his main asset is physical endurance. Unfortunately, even the best marathon runners tire and shit themselves, which is probably exactly what Madoff is doing these days. <center><br /><a target="_Blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513671903/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7155/6513671903_6cdf59b0e9.jpg" width="500" height="274" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>3. <i>Army of Shadows (L'armée des ombres)</i>, 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville.</b> Not a crime movie exactly, unless you count Nazis as criminals, which basically nobody does anymore. Vive la Résistance.<center><br /><a target="_Blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513671973/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7018/6513671973_9ac5c85726.jpg" width="500" height="288" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>4. <i>Body Heat</i>, 1981, Lawrence Kasdan.</b> <b><i>Body Heat</i></b> is about a lawyer played by William Hurt who has an affair with the wife of a wealthy businessman. He is quickly ensnared in a plot to kill her husband. See, lawyers are people too. It’s the single largest act of betrayal perpetrated in Miami-Dade county pre-Lebron James. And the sex. Oh, the sex. It’s so inappropriately graphic, it’s like watching your parents do it. Great performances by Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Ted Danson, and Kasdan captures the fetid, damp rot of south Florida perfectly, which is fortunate, as I personally have no desire to visit.<center><br /><a target="_Blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513672045/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7148/6513672045_739b7531e5.jpg" width="500" height="334" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>5. <i>Revanche</i>, 2008, Götz Spielmann.</b> We all know one of the dumbest crimes is trying to turn a Ho into a Housewife. Thankfully, <b><i>Revanche</i></b> knows this too. By killing off the female lead, the film is allowed to move onto more interesting relationships, like that of an aging father and his wayward son. Alex (played by Johannes Krisch) contemplates revenge numerous times: against his lover’s killer (gun), against his own father (Oedipal), and against many logs of firewood (axe) but manages to find a sort of redemption.<center><br /><a target="_Blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6513672099/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7149/6513672099_da549f2cdd.jpg" width="500" height="276" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>6. VOICEOVER:</b> <i>The Only Thing More Dangerous Than a Bartender Serving You Drinks is One That’s Feeding You LIES. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a 1973 Film by Peter Yates. </i> <br /><br />[cut to: A MASKED MAN FIRING A SHOTGUN. The screen goes black.] <br /><br /><b>V.O. (CONT’D)</b>: <i>With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies.</i><br /><br />[title: NOW PLAYING.]<br /><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Julian Tran and Cuyler Ballenger are writers living in New York. But they're friends, just like California. Julian can be found <a target="_blank" href="http://www.juliantran.com">here</a> and Cuyler writes at <a target="_blank" href="http://cablesports.blogspot.com">http://cablesports.blogspot.com</a></i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-68633949031920814132011-12-19T06:30:00.001-08:002011-12-20T18:16:47.049-08:00BANG BANG: Adam Hartzell<i>[<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/rZG6ps">BANG BANG</a> is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]</i><center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6521273785/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6521273785_2e34ce5d5d.jpg" width="500" height="203" alt=""></a></center><br />by Adam Hartzell<br /><br />I spend most of my time watching movies out of sync with my time and place. Since I prefer cinema from elsewhere, only one U.S. film makes my Top Ten, though it does make the top spot. Work and financial constraints keep me from traveling abroad for film festival premieres, which means I have to wait until they make it here to San Francisco. So my Top Ten lists usually say something about my cosmopolitan dreams that are anchored awake by my restricted finances and mobility. But here are 10 films which were released this year, or made their way to Bay Area festivals in 2011, about which I have found myself still ruminating in a positive way since they shined their light and heat on my eyes.<br /> <br /><b>10. <i>Passion (Khusel Shunal)</i></b> (Byamba Sakhya, 2010, Mongolia) I knew nothing about Mongolian cinema until this documentary about said cinema, told through a lonely road movie, found its way into the program of this year's San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival. Now I want to know more, which is ironic since the film presents a pessimistic view of Mongolian cinema's future. But it's at least caught the fascination of one viewer even more isolated from this nation's cinema than the Mongolian residents portrayed in the documentary.<br /><br /><b>9. <i>Aurélie Laflamme's Diary</i></b> (Christian Laurence, 2010, Canada) A French language film from Quebec that was part of the NY/SF International Children's Film Festival that ran from October 21-23 at Viz Cinema, it ended up winning an audience award. I would have voted for it as well, had I seen it in the theater along with that awarding audience rather than on DVD for an <a target="_blank" href="http://sf360.org/page/13916" target="_blank">sf360.org overview I wrote on the festival</a>. It's a teen film that doesn't have to throw an <b><i>American-Pie</i></b> in our faces thinking that will entertain the kids and kidults. Marianne Verville is a refreshing presence in the lead role, allowed to be awkward in what is an awkward time of our lives. Plus, although she gets the boy the genre demands, she isn't swan-ed away from her duckling beginnings.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6521273693/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7015/6521273693_f2c32b8f77.jpg" width="500" height="332" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>8. <i>The Trip</i></b> (Michael Winterbottom, 2011, United Kingdom) I am still laughing about the scene where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are riffing on announcing the inexact time of an ancient battle. Adding to this comedic pleasure was that I got to laugh at this scene along with a friend I hadn’t seen in some time whom I randomly ran into in the lobby of The Bridge theatre before the screening. It was a nice day in the Richmond neighborhood thanks to the run-ins such local establishments afford.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6521273905/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7160/6521273905_aeac21f3be.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>7. <i>Oki's Movie</i></b> (Hong Sang-soo, 2010, South Korea) I got to see three of my favorite director’s films for the first time this year. (The others were <b><i>Ha Ha Ha</i></b> on DVD because I couldn't make the screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival and <b><i>The Day He Arrives</i></b> on screen at the Starz Denver Film Festival in mid-November with the proprietor of the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/">Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee blog</a>, Peter Nellhaus.) Thanks to the <a target="_blank" href="">Yerba Buena Center for the Arts</a>, I was able to watch <b><i>Oki's Movie</i></b> in the theatre in late June after having already seen it on DVD to prepare a piece for sf360. I'm biased in that I always find something to ruminate on endlessly in a Hong film (even with my least favorite, <b><i>Woman Is the Future of Man</i></b>). But <b><i>Oki's Movie</i></b> seems to have won over those who haven't been fans of his work. I think a big reason is the auditioning of men in Oki's movie nested within "Oki's Movie" that Andrew Tracy expertly analyzes in the Fall 2010 issue of <a target="_blank" href="http://cinema-scope.com/wordpress/web-archive-2/">Cinema Scope</a> magazine.<br /><br /><b>6. <i>The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls</i></b> (Leanne Pooley, 2009, New Zealand) Finally getting the theatre release it deserved, <b><i>The Topp Twins</i></b> graced our local screens outside of the film festivals that started the momentum (Frameline in 2010 and Mostly British in 2011). I own the DVD and saw the film in the theatre three times, once each at those festivals and once in Berkeley at Shattuck Cinemas with my cousin when it was released. Even after all these screenings, I'm still moved by how much major moments of the lives of these yodeling, country singing lesbian twins are tied up with major political successes in New Zealand history. I am still giddy about getting to meet them for <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sf360.org/Home/?pageid=13601">an interview for sf360</a>, the most nervous I have ever been for an interview.<br /><br /><b>5. <i>Poetry</i></b> (Lee Chang-dong, 2010, South Korea) <b><i>Poetry</i></b> definitively represents what I have been appreciating lately about South Korean cinema - how much it has opened up cinematic space for its senior actresses. Yun Jung-hee came out of retirement for this virtuoso performance of Lee Chang-dong's as he continues to explore the life of the outsider in South Korea. During my first draft of this brief commentary on <b><i>Poetry</i></b>, I went into a rant about how, if there failed to be a Best Actress nom nod to Yun, the Oscars would continue to be irrelevant in my cinematic life. But after writing that draft, I went to talk with <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/hellonfriscobay">Brian Darr</a> of <a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com">Hell on Frisco Bay</a> blog and he informed me the Los Angeles Critic Circle gave Yun their Best Actress award. As a result, I put my seething rage at the Oscars as a failed institution back into its cage to be unleashed some other day.<center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6521273965/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7149/6521273965_6186088b80.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>4. <i>The Salesman</i></b> (Sébastian Pilote, 2011, Canada) I am someone upon whom car commercials fail to make the intended impact. I don't desire the products they advertise. And I don't buy into the false sense of freedom the commercials purport to symbolize. (The streets are usually much more crowded than as portrayed in the commercials and buying a car shackles you with debt, high gas prices, and vast acres of asphalt requirements for roads and parking.) That said, I'm primed to appreciate the tragedy in <b><i>The Salesman</i></b>, a perfect example of a genre I'm calling 'Post Peak Oil Cinema', where the life of a successful car salesman is turned on its head by the very products he sells so successfully. <b><i>The Salesman</i></b> is a sad, sad film that doesn't pummel you but rather slowly piles upon you like the snow that surrounds this little Quebec town.<br /><br /><b>3. <i>The Life of Fish</i></b> (Matías Bize, 2010, Chile) My wife and I caught this film during our yearly Caltrain trip to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.cinequest.org/indexCQ.php">Cinequest</a> in San Jose because it fit with our schedule and it's one of those happy accident, eeny-meeny-miney-mo(e)ments where you select a film with no real sense of what you are getting yourself into and you realize the programmers have made an excellent choice for you. In this film, we travel through a party held in a single house as our main character relives his younger self through his memories and those of others. Simple, poignant, and delightful.<center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6521302973/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7006/6521302973_a22decf5f9.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt=""></a></center><br /><b>2. <i>Nostalgia for the Light</i></b> (Patrico Guzmán, 2010, France/Chile/Germany) This was a truly amazing film I saw in the Dolby screening room as part of the press screenings for the <a target="_blank" href="http://fest11.sffs.org/">San Francisco International Film Festival this year</a>. Guzmán’s pairing of professional astronomers with amateur archaeologists works on so many levels. Even though the archaeologists are searching for the remains of family members killed by their own government, somehow, in spite of all this, Guzmán leaves us with tremendous hope for humanity.<br /><br /><b>1. <i>Deaf Jam</i></b> (Judy Lieff, 2011, USA) I have not had the experience with a film for a long time like I had with Lieff’s documentary about high school Deaf poets venturing out into the venues of a (hearing) poetry slam. Cinema transfixed me again at the Mill Valley Film Festival like it did the first time I could not stopping about the impact a film had on me. Lieff captures the vibrancy of American Sign Language through several tactics of translation. Her willingness to mess with the text of subtitling the poems in the opening sequence is mesmerizing. At the same time, she even took the risk not to translate the ASL later in the film and it is just as powerful sans subtitles. Mixed in with this story of the life of young Deaf folk is a story about the struggles of immigrant children whose parents’ citizenship comes after they enter adulthood and a friendship between a young Israeli Jew and Palestinian Muslim. Lieff and the subjects of her documentary show us how ASL is as perfect a language of cinema as any other, leaving you hoping Lieff and the students she films don’t stop here. We need these stories. We need this kind of active, engaged cinema.<center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6521274073/" title="Untitled by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7162/6521274073_56db72e906.jpg" width="500" height="359" alt=""></a></center><i><br />________________________________<br /><br />Adam Hartzell is totally bummed that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sf360.org/">sf360.org</a> is no longer publishing because he had a blast writing for them for three years. He continues to write for Brian Darr's San Francisco film blog, <a target="_blank" href="http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com">Hell on Frisco Bay</a>, and the premier English language website on South Korean cinema, <a target="_blank" href="http://koreanfilm.org/">Koreanfilm.org</a>. He began this year as a guest on an episode of the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.vcinemashow.com/">VCinema podcast</a> where he discussed the original version and the recent re-visioning of the South Korean classic <b>The Housemaid</b> (<a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/t9IWo1 ">MP3</a>). He has had a few magazine pieces in <a target="_blank" href="http://kyotojournal.org/">Kyoto Journal</a>, a chapter on The Power of Kangwon Province for <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1904764118/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=asleepover-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1904764118">The Cinema of Japan and Korea (Wallflower Press)</a>, and next year he will have a bunch of essays in the upcoming publication of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1841505609/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=asleepover-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1841505609">World Directory of Cinema: Korea</a> (Intellect, Ltd.).</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-26536312911026581832011-11-29T05:46:00.001-08:002011-11-29T05:47:27.012-08:00Summer CH Counterpointby Mark Haslam and Ryland Walker Knight<center><br />
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/32778780?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></center>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-49674120397926190382011-10-03T00:00:00.000-07:002011-10-03T00:21:50.496-07:00Viewing Log #85: When you are the cancerby Ryland Walker Knght<center><br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6174517044/" title="Don't dent yourself (too late) by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6174/6174517044_3bfa589f35.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt="Don't dent yourself (too late)"></a></center><br />
<i>[Amidst a few other films I watched and writing projects I kept chipping away at in August, I finished the second season of AMC's <b>Breaking Bad</b>.]</i><center><br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6206065227/" title="Homeless by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6024/6206065227_7d2656ca62.jpg" width="500" height="279" alt="Homeless"></a></center><br />
Right off the bat: Skyler is the worst. Anna Gunn is brave, but Skyler is as unsympathetic a character as I've ever seen. So much so that I had to stop watching the episodes back to back, as is the common desire with instant/on-demand viewing. However, I quickly fell back into plowing through one episode then another, in part because I'm attracted to how condensed the story is compared to, say, <i><b>Mad Men</b></i>, where time's certainly not of the essence unless by dint of the television medium's format (seems there's a lot of "something's gotta happen eventually" in <i><b>MM</b></i>). It's not as condensed and rigorous as either Milch HBO show (to date) but then even <i><b>Deadwood</b></i> feels like years given all the time that passes in between its season arcs. <b><i>Breaking Bad</i></b>, on the other hand, though it plays with time some, is mostly driven by a consequential logic. In other words, I was surprised to see this season start precisely where the last one ended. But it makes sense.<br />
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The genius of the show, if I can use that word, is how much attention is paid to every step Walter takes towards villainy. We get to watch a basically good brain go, yes, bad. We see all the rationale behind his choices, sometimes without words. I told a friend it was like Dostoevsky and I meant it. But the delusion of doing wrong in the name of good isn't just a trope of the great Russian depressive; it's really rather common. The idea of "white lies" comes from somewhere not related to white nights. I think it comes from everyday life. One must contend, all the time, with too many compromising choices to remain moral. However, this show, unlike those Milch masterpieces, isn't concerned with the ethical life. No, this is just the wrong way to do things. Remember the title: it's forgoing the righteous path.<br />
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And if <i><b>Mad Men</b></i> is about television as advertising, <i><b>Breaking Bad</b></i> is certainly about television as a drug: a perfectly calibrated bit of magic that keeps you coming back for more, designed to hit you where it hurts and where it feels the best. (Why else watch more than one episode at a time, right? It becomes a compulsion, if not outright addiction.) This show, like <i><b>The Sopranos</b></i>, makes you complicit, designs a rooting interest in Walter, and dares you to not get excited with him and for him. Until, of course, he explodes and, as his brow lowers, all that venom bubbles up. The most obvious and scary instance of this is when he beats up that towel dispenser (see evidence above). Unlike <i><b>The Sopranos</b></i>, nothing is glamorous here. There's nothing sexy about two men making meth in a desert, or anything related to meth. Hell, the meth cooking passages are my least favorite parts of the show. Krysten Ritter may be sexy, but the show goes out of its way to make her unsexy by the end of her character's sad, pathetic, idiotic life. Her death, after all, is just another instance of Walter's growing selfishness as the root of his growing evil. For Walter's whole trajectory is about taking control of his life. But he's pretty lousy at that, too, since he's only ever looking for shortcuts. And, again, the show shows us that these are all myopic moves from a novice. That's maybe my favorite part: these people are idiots. <br />
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Walter is a chemistry genius, I suppose, but he's a child compared to Pollos Gus. (Giancarlo Esposito is so awesome at his two face it's incredible; yet another movie-quality actor brought to television and instantly upping the ante.) I suspect he will change the game going forward quite a bit more than Saul Goodman, though Bob Odenkirk is about as crucial an element as can be. After all, he's the only one expressly keeping the comedy going. He has his moments of clarity and seriousness but he's mainly there to act the fool, to play dumb—though he's not dumb, at least not as dumb as Walter—to show the other dummies how dumb they are. This vision of comedy is quite close to condescension. I get that. But nothing's so simple in this show. It's a black comedy, after all, where everything farcical is tied to horror. The horrific is often papered over by laughter in order to diffuse tension, but sometimes horrible things are just horrible. Like letting a girl choke to death on smack-induced vomiting. Other times, horrible things can be hilarious—because they're so stupid—like Saul's whole wardrobe.<br />
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Not sure what to do with the framing device of the season, but the tidy color coding of the teddy and Walter's sweater seems obvious. Walter is adrift, charred by wrong. And all that build up to that collision seems like a ploy, not plotting. I cannot imagine how that's going to actually effect the trajectory of Season Three other than Jesse's already rock bottom self-esteem flatlining a little longer. But maybe we're (I'm) in for another rise. Maybe Jesse will seize sobriety and do some things right. Worst case, which it usually is, he'll be a marginally better criminal because he'll be clean. Best case, it'll complicate how Walter sees him, because Jesse is certainly something in his life that Walter can and has controlled. I doubt Jesse will learn how to interpret his way out of manipulative moves by Walter, but he'll likely get better at staking a claim for himself in kind. Then again, Jesse's kind of the show's test dummy <i>par excellence</i>, a raggedy ann at the mercy of bigger and stronger and meaner people. His best episodes in the season were all about his sensitivity. Hope he doesn't get beat up so much that he loses it. Walt sure is trying to lose his.<center><br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6206017403/" title="You are not okay here at all by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6175/6206017403_12a786a7de.jpg" width="500" height="279" alt="You are not okay here at all"></a><i><br />
—You are not okay here at all</i></center>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-42829688809017331852011-09-18T15:30:00.000-07:002011-09-24T08:31:27.376-07:00Viewing Log #84: So rid of all your stories [9/9/11 - 9/18/11]by Ryland Walker Knight<center><br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6162651431/" title="Security by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6163/6162651431_cbcb01ce49.jpg" width="500" height="280" alt="Security"></a></center><br />
<ul><li><b><i>Breaking Bad</i> Season 1, [Vince Gilligan, 2008]</b> So far, I'm a fan of the farcical elements that sharpen the edges of the drama and elevate the show past one of the stupidest (or most roll-your-eyes) pitches you can imagine. <i>Oh, a failed chemist now teaches high school and has cancer and, get this, to pay for his chemo he starts selling the purest crystal meth ever thanks to his skills in and knowledge of chemistry? Yeah, that sounds like a party—when does it air?</i> That train of thought is why I never watched. But my friend told me it was funny, actually, and since the first three seasons are all on Netflix Instant at present I thought I'd give it a shot. Turns out she was right and I was wrong! It's not dumb, it's funny. But it's dark, a black comedy. However, I can imagine things only get heavier as Walter White turns into more of a heavy. For now, I'm enjoying all the play on that line we draw between right and wrong, legal and not, good and evil. Plus, it's about money in the late oughts and that's bonus points right there.<br />
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</li>
<li><b><i>Drive</i> [N.W.Refn, 2011] #</b> I gave it a second chance and I'm still unimpressed. It simply doesn't add up. For a while, after I read the Sallis book a couple times, I thought it might be interesting to write an article all about adaptation using this as an intriguing example (as part of the pitch, too, I'll be honest). But the adaptation's strengths are lost in the haze of what Refn's after, which I think can be simplified to one of the weirdest ways to say, "I love you," to his wife (1). Even disregarding that mostly useless extrapolation of projection-as-interpretation, the object itself is rather basic, though pretty, and altogether empty—a film of integers arrayed, not added up, instead of the matrix of significance it seems to pose as in all those extra beats and drawn out googly eyes scenes. That is, there are a lot of "symbols" that don't add up to any kind of meaning. The most interesting motif—the satin scorpio jacket—is ruined, near the close, with that line of dialog that acts like a "looky here!" instead of letting the images and editing reinforce that the jacket is his armor, what keeps him alive, if not a second skin. He's not wearing it at all times, but when he's not wearing it, he's holding it across an arm. Or he's draping it on the kid, which is both an everyday gesture (keep the kid warm) and a gesture of protection (shielding the boy) (2). After all (spoiler), our "real hero" is stabbed in the gut while he's wearing this "trademark" and he doesn't die; that gratuitous act of violence just bloodies him, and the festishistic camera glides up his stoic face to reify this guy as alone, like so many "heroes" before. What Danny calls soulless, I call boring. I might even call it rote. But I must cop to the fact that I spent a lot of time anticipating the movie, and gabbing with my friends about it afterwards, but more in SF than Cannes because I felt I had to explain myself a lot more. Point is, there's obviously things there (Refn knows how to compose shots, if not film action) if it spawned this many words, this many hours of thinking and talking. Thing is, I still want more to warrant it all.<br />
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</li>
<li><b><i>The Driver</i> [Walter Hill, 1978] #</b> Hoberman called it schematic in his review of the Refn picture. I think it's great. My favorite scene might be the one where he trashes their orange Benz to prove his skills behind the wheel. And Isabelle Adjani is super hot. Total score. I've got "deeper thoughts" but this is all you get here.<br />
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</li>
<li><b><i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i> "Larry vs Michael J. Fox" [Alec Berg, 2011</b> <i>"Thank God he didn't hand you his dick, you know what I mean? He coulda been shaking and shook that dick up, hand you the dick and the dick shot sperm in your face."</i> Finally, a few truly great Leon moments and lines. And what an amazing guest spot: so awesome MJF can make fun of himself like that. And what about that "Paris" set? Priceless.<br />
</li>
<li><b><i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i> "Mister Softee" [Larry Charles, 2011]</b> A weaker link, but, granted, this one had some good Leon moments, too, to spice up the rather "predictable" convergence of threads.<br />
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</li>
<li><b><i>Contagion</i> [Steven Soderbergh, 2011]</b> American movie of the year? Maybe. Truly digital, truly D-G capitalism-as-schizophrenia, truly mosaic. A cheap shot of a human villain in Law, but it's the filmmaking (moviemaking? it's digital, after all...) that elevates the often obvious script. That and the actors. But more later. <b>UPDATE:</B> <a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/niZmL8">Here's more</a>.<br />
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</li>
<li><b><i>The Runaways</i> [Floria Sigismondi, 2011]</b> It starts well, with all that messy sex stuff and Michael Shannon doing something flamboyant instead of all nervous everywhere, but it sure hits a wall when they get famous and it tries to slow down to get serious as if those two things were dependent on one another. Was really ready for this to join <b><i>Whip It</i></b> as this fall's grrl movie I have a place for in my heart but this one just isn't that one.</li>
</ul><center><br />
<a target="_blank" href="http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Drive-poster-albert-brooks-620x929.jpg"><img src="http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Drive-poster-albert-brooks-620x929.jpg" width="500" alt="the man"></a><br />
<i>—The real star of the picture</i></center><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(1) Refn basically said as much to Durga during <a target="_blank" href="http://bit.ly/q8AY9l">their interview</a>.<br />
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(2) <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/Cambomb">Cambomb</a> gave me this reading.</span>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-60448984118792189152011-09-08T23:14:00.001-07:002011-09-08T23:23:02.151-07:00Viewing Log #83: Moving daze [9/1/11 - 9/8/11]<p>by Ryland Walker Knight</p>
<p><center><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6105002513/" title="Hide your eyes! by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6080/6105002513_16824b2aac.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Hide your eyes!"></a>
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/6105002545/" title="No peeking! by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6069/6105002545_9b1dfdca45.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="No peeking!"></a></center></p>
<p>My summer travels are long gone, crowding the rearview like a bus. I'm back in San Francisco, working, writing, slowly piecing together some more moving images. Not as much fun as galavanting around Europe. But not awful. Truth is, I have a good life. In fact, I missed it quite a bit while I was gone. I did not miss writing the viewing log, but I know of at least one friend (and a certain mom) who did miss reading them/me. So I think I'll start it up again. That said, I've been reading more than watching movies. But I still watch movies. In fact, there's a number I should watch sooner than later. But there's also a ton I won't fret pushing down the line. Especially during a stretch like this when the US Open's going (starting and stopping and starting as it has) and there's all kinds of drama right there along those baselines (not to mention the weather report). But I'll stop boring you with this intro that's only yet another stalling tactic. The important thing is that I cannot recall all I watched since Cannes so I'm starting over since the beginning of this month. So, working backwards as ever, let's count from ten down to zero.</p>
<p><ul><li><b><i>The Mechanic</i> [Simon West, 2011]</b> West is a pretty lousy action director, forever chopping up things in useless/pointless ways that are obnoxious in their advertising gleam more than any spatial misrepresentation. He gets space fine, as some killings make perfect sense in living room geometry, but he's bad with bodies. Too often we see a body as one limb or another and only for a second. It's not surprising that the big stunt (the fall off the building) is the only time you see Jason Statham and Ben Foster's whole bodies moving through a space; it's annoying that the shots are so fisheyed and seesawing between their perspectives, but props for shooting the fall as their POVs; it's a good stunt, sure, but it's so clearly staged that any verve you get from seeing these dudes do their own stunt is lost in a fit of sped-up frame rates shot on super fast film stock. And yet, these guys are, as the saying goes, "compulsively watchable." I like seeing Statham clench his jaw and shoot guns. I'm looking forward to another <i><b>Expendables</b></i> installment. And I like Ben Foster's ability to project hurt in his angry way through roles. I'll always watch him play a psycho.</li>
<li><b><i>How Do You Know</i> [James L. Brooks, 2010] #</b> Flipped over during the rain delay in the Fed-Tsonga match. The scene with the newborn and the proposal is unbeatable. Lenny Venito is the man.</li>
<br><li><b><i>Bridesmaids</i> [Paul Feig, 2011] #</b> Went to the Castro, which was packed with single ladies and gay boys in pairs and quartets all over the auditorium, and had a blast. It definitely tapers, but it is so fun with an audience. More on Wiig and McCarthy soon.</li>
<br><li><b><i>War of the Worlds</i> [Steve, 2005] #</b> This is how you make action scenes. The first 70 minutes of this movie are maybe flawless. Or, those contain some truly/typical visionary stuff from good old Steve. Why does nobody talk about how great his master shots are? Because even simple one-take shots/scenes are awesome, like after the lightning when Tom goes through the living room, flipping the light switch and trying the cell phone and tapping his stopped-dead watch, all handheld without shakes and without a cut. Every camera movement is justified in a Spielberg set piece. It's crazy how rigorous and off-handed he can be. Too bad so much of this one stinks.</li>
<br><li><b><i>Louie</i> "Niece" [Louis CK, 2011] #</b> Hard to follow the Afghanistan episode, so it kind of makes sense to go all serious in this one. Yet another stranger teaching Louie-Louis how he's gotta go with the world, and be in it, instead of only approaching it from outside. But this one was a deep cut since it revolves around a young girl getting abandoned. Still, loving this season. Duh.</li>
<br><li><b><i>Monkey Business</i> [Howard Hawks, 1952] #</b> Rivette said it better but this movie's interest in where we place intelligence is basically a punchline to the entire search for the bone that is the movie we saw just before...</li>
<li><b><i>Bringing Up Baby</i> [Howard Hawks, 1938] #</b> ...which is just about as good as it gets in terms of zany, fast-as-a-nail-gun screwball ping ponging of plot and characters. Plus all that Cavell stuff. I've said it before. Look it up.</li>
<br><li><b><i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i> "Car Periscope" [David Mandel, 2011]</b> Not quite as laugh out loud funny for me as the prior week's "Bi Sexual" but still pretty great. This season definitely seems more bound up in the clever concepts Larry's dreamt up rather than an arc as the last two seasons showed. Basically I want as much Leon as I can get and I'm barely getting any.</li>
<br><li><b><i>The Awful Truth</i> [Leo McCarey, 1937] #</b> The best. Without a doubt. Okay maybe a little doubt. In any case, there are few movies as fun and smart at the same time. Never hurts to see it with an appreciative crowd and two great friends, either.</li></ul></p>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-6662697536404077862011-07-18T06:00:00.001-07:002011-07-20T11:52:03.668-07:00CHEZ MOCKING SEAGULLby Ryland Walker Knight<center><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/26587928?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0"></iframe></center><br />One day in Cannes, I woke up rather early.Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-48811130825301688182011-05-27T09:30:00.002-07:002011-06-20T03:23:22.174-07:00A conjunction of quotations #13— edited by Ryland Walker Knight<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5678935788/" title="by Paul Nozolino by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5150/5678935788_a0cae35991.jpg" width="500" height="342" alt="by Paul Nozolino"></a><i><br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://last-tapes.blogspot.com/2011/04/uma-fotografia-de-paulo-nozolino.html">Paul Nozolino</a></i></center><b><br />1.</b><br />We don't even know if what ends in daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that fall over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I'll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world's darkness.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141183047/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=asleepover-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0141183047">Fernando Pessoa</a><br /><b><br />2.</b><br />C. Bergvall says space is doubt—<br />What emerges then?<br />Something cast in aluminum from a one-half scale model of a freight shed<br />Intrication<br />The slight smudge of snow in the shadow of each haycock in the still-green field<br />The hotel of Europe. Its shutters.<br />Fields and woods oscillate as in Poussin<br />While the vote is against renewed empire, or at least capital temporarily<br />Each wants to tell about it but not necessarily in language<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/2552/space-to-play-lisa-robertson-on-poetry-and-inspiration/">Lisa Robertson</a><br /><b><br />3.</b><br />Walked through Covent Garden; there were five of their mimes knocking about. I don't understand why people take pictures of mimes. Everyone looks like a mime in a picture.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pilkipedia.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Karl_Pilkington">Karl Pilkington</a><br /><b><br />4.</b><br />Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To where were the foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+38&version=NKJV">Job, 38:4-7</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/thetreeoflife/">º</a><br /><b><br />5.</b><br />English has a hard time speaking the deed, articulating the event. We can speak actively — I love you — or passively: I am loved. But it's difficult to speak in a way that is neither active nor passive, that is both active and passive: loving. Which is to say, it's difficult to speak <i>with</i> the world because either we're doing things <i>to</i> it or things are being done <i>to</i> us.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://hilariousbookbinder.blogspot.com/2011/05/towards-middle-voice.html">Daniel Coffeen</a><br /><b><br />6.</b><br />There’s no need to invoke the Beyond when talking about Dreyer. Neither God, nor master. <i>Just soul, that’s all.</i> A gospel of images, that’s all. That the images happen to be sharp, ultra-sharp, is a plus – a ‘bonus’, as people say these days. The essential thing in Dreyer (as in Fassbinder, the master of cinema after cinema, which obviously needs a master) is what he tells, not how he tells it. What he sings, if you like. Oh, you don't like, you want your short-order review of <i>Ordet</i>. And what does <i>Ordet</i> even mean? It means ‘the word’. And that means there is speech, and that this speech matters. Is that too complicated for you? Tough luck.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.rouge.com.au/10/louis_louie.html">Louis Skorecki</a><br /><b><br />7.</b><br />The logic of artistic construction and esthetic appreciation is peculiarly significant because they exemplify in accentuated and purified form the control of selection of detail and of mode of relation, or integration, by a qualitative whole. The underlying quality demands certain distinctions, and the degree in which the demand is met confers upon the work of art that necessary or inevitable character which is its mark. Formal necessities, such as can be made explicit, depend upon the material necessity imposed by the pervasive and underlying quality. Artistic thought is not however unique in this respect but only shows an intensification of a characteristic of all thought. In a looser way, it is a characteristic of all nontechnical, non-"scientific" thought. Scientific thought is, in its turn, a specialized form of art, with its own qualitative control. The more formal and mathematical science becomes, the more it is controlled by sensitiveness to a special kind of qualitative considerations. Failure to realize the qualitative and artistic nature of formal scientific construction is due to two causes. One is conventional, the habit of associating art and esthetic appreciation with a few popularly recognized forms. The other cause is the fact that a student is so concerned with the mastery of symbolic or prepositional forms that he fails to recognize and to repeat the creative operations involved in their construction. Or, when they are mastered, he is more concerned with their further application than with realization of their intrinsic intellectual meaning.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/45.301%20Ways%20of%20Knowing/Qualitative%20Thought.htm">John Dewey</a><br /><b><br />8.</b><br />My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://butdoesitfloat.com/1371102/My-difficulty-is-only-an-enormous-difficulty-of-expression?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ButDoesItFloat+%28but+does+it+float%29">Wittgenstein</a><br /><b><br />9.</b><br />Somebody go fetch me a preacher<br />So I can buy the rights...<br />I wanna love <i>you!</i><br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://soundcloud.com/ryknight/the-right-to-love-you">The Mighty Hannibal</a><br /><b><br />10.</b><br />I’ve been dancing so long, I don't know. Maybe. I don't know, I’m not against the idea. Again, it’s like these guys in the play entering middle age. You say, well, what stopped me from this, and was it the other person, or was it in me? And I don’t have the full answer for that. I was never really settled in being an actor, what I wanted to really do in my mind was think, Okay, let me settle that first because then I’ll do this. Because if you get married and have kids you should shovel shit for them, you really should. When I was 25 or 35, "shoveling shit" in my parlance would mean doing really crappy movies, intentionally making crappy movies I didn't want to do. I mean, I had some that came out crappy, but it was never the ideal.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/03/jason_patric_interview_lost_bo.html">Jason Patric</a><br /><b><br />11.</b><br />We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.great-quotes.com/quote/1373673">Jason Kidd</a><br /><b><br />12.</b><br />Sometimes it’s unfair, because of how strong I am.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.thescore.com/tbj/2011/03/31/lebron-is-too-strong-for-your-sissy-fouls">LeBron James</a><br /><b><br />13.</b><br />The palm at the end of the mind,<br />Beyond the last thought, rises<br />In the bronze distance.<br /><br />A gold-feathered bird<br />Sings in the palm, without human meaning,<br />Without human feeling, a foreign song.<br /><br />You know then that it is not the reason<br />That makes us happy or unhappy.<br />The bird sings. Its feathers shine.<br /><br />The palm stands on the edge of space.<br />The wind moves slowly in the branches.<br />The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://ofmerebeing.com/the-poem/">Wallace Stevens</a><br /><b><br />14.</b><br />The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679723412/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=asleepover-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0679723412">Vladimir Nabokov</a><br /><b><br />15.</b><br />Forgiving is never as easy as we would like. Apparently quite a lot of people cried.<br />— <a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview">Karen Green</a>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-37745000896820897922011-05-25T03:00:00.000-07:002011-09-11T13:09:06.005-07:00Cannes 2011 #5: Wraps so lissome she could flyby Ryland Walker Knight<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5752561094/" title="WITH A VIEW by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3186/5752561094_c6b6601346.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="WITH A VIEW"></a></center><br />Got a few more dispatches hitting <a target="_blank" href="http://www.cargo-film.de/festival/cannes/">the Cargo site</a> late, post-fest due to my computer being tied up with FCP work and my aversion to writing on "foreign" keyboards all last week. Granted, I wrote a lot by hand, but not all of that's for the internet's eyes to see. So keep checking that link.<br /><br />There's a high school behind my friend's apartment in Milan and the constant babble is almost better than music. Except when the glee club (they have those here?) starts trying to harmonize "Don't Stop Believing" for a good half an hour. That's when I retreated to headphones. But watching basketball happen, even when it's bad and these kids can't shoot, was better than half the movies I saw at the festival. Too bad I forgot to grab my camera. Too bad I just watched. But also not: living and making don't have to be one and the same at every juncture and I'm glad I hold that memory, like the waves off the beach at Cannes those first two days, or like certain dinners out in the streets, in a corner of my brain you will never open even if your eyes are wide. I'm reminded of windows at all events; it's probably why I shoot them so much.<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5757508939/" title="LÀ FUORI by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5268/5757508939_7960e9bf79.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="LÀ FUORI"></a></center><br /><b>UPDATE WAY LATER:</b> Found the Indonesian TV clip I was in <a target="_blank" href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiorkc_journalists-in-cannes_shortfilms">over here</a>. I play the yokel quite well.Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-62265461314838274422011-05-17T13:45:00.011-07:002011-07-01T04:42:20.937-07:00Cannes 2011 #4: Cannes Questionnairesby Ryland Walker Knight<center><b><br /># 1: <a target="_blank" href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cannes-2011-cannes-questionnaires-1-gerardo-naranjo">Gerardo Naranjo</a></b><br /><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23877114?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0"></iframe></center><br />Here's a post I will continue to update as we post these videos on <a target="_blank" href="http://vimeo.com/ryknight">vimeo</a> and in <a target="_blank" href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts?category=Cannes+Questionnaires">The Notebook</a>. Our first, with Gerardo Naranjo, had its fair share of problems, like a battery dying and the implementation of Danny's Flip in lieu of the T2i, and our second, with BONG Joon-ho, presented new audio issues. Luckily, most of our audience will see the video first on MUBI so this little bit of text won't set up expectations of post-synch hiccups. <br /><br />In any case, more are in the pipe. We hope you like them because it's a lot of fun for us; maybe even more fun than writing.<center><br /><b><br /># 2: <a target="_blank" href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cannes-2011-cannes-questionnaires-2-bong-joon-ho--2">BONG Joon-ho</a></b><br /><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23973758?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br /><b><br /><br /># 3: <a target="_blank" href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cannes-2011-cannes-questionnaires-3-bruno-dumont">Bruno Dumont</a></b><br /><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/24071657?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br /><b><br /><br /># 4: <a target="_blank" href="">Vimukthi Jayasundara</a></b><br /><i><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/25513247?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0"></iframe></i></center>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-52010270561272392722011-05-16T05:50:00.002-07:002011-06-02T04:30:59.770-07:00Cannes 2011 #3: There is no tunnel, only lightby Ryland Walker Knight<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5725882595/" title="SAUMON FUMÉ by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5068/5725882595_865873a4b2.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="SAUMON FUMÉ"></a></center><br />After <i><b>Tree of Life</b></i> I made some eggs (above) and wrote my mom a letter about the movie, which I am very happy to have seen but that made me miss a lot of people at home and elsewhere. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.cargo-film.de/festival/cannes/">Here's the link to Cargo again</a>.<br /><b><br />UPDATE:</b> If you want to see me still dazed (though also re-caffeinated) and bemused in the bustling lobby of the Palais after the film, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/may/16/cannes-2011-reel-review-tree-life-video">watch this video at The Guardian</a>.Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-66786063561177689802011-05-13T10:30:00.000-07:002011-05-28T11:59:08.965-07:00Cannes 2011 #2: Making things happenby Ryland Walker Knight<center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5713100072/" title="D-CANNES-MAN by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2727/5713100072_b606aa7760.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="D-CANNES-MAN"></a></center><br />So far, so sweaty. Or, thank heavens we have a clothesline outside our kitchen window. Without providing any real content, let me remind you that you should check in with <a target="_blank" href="http://www.cargo-film.de/festival/cannes/">this dedicated blog at Cargo's website</a> for my more or less long-form coverage the festival. My first missive, about the new Woody Allen movie, which I liked, is up. Early Thursday morning, I saw <i><b>We Need To Talk About Kevin</i></b>, Lynne Ramsay's newest, the one we've been waiting for since 2002 or 2003, and it's got chops like her other work, but I'll save my more potent/cogent thoughts for another Cargo blog. If you follow me on <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/ryknight">twitter</a> you can get more immediate, though maybe cryptic, takes as I find wifi post-screenings. And, oh yeah, Danny and I will have some moving images at <a target="_blank" href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts">The Notebook</a> in due time. Never fear: there will be updates.<center><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5715456952/" title="GREENORE NIGHTS by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3571/5715456952_152a10c6da.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="GREENORE NIGHTS"></a></center><br /><i>[Note: I thought I posted something yesterday but it seems to have disappeared; the text above has been changed. Bonus, maybe: here I am, drinking some good whiskey.]</i>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-54307352416910147392011-05-11T00:15:00.000-07:002011-05-28T11:59:08.990-07:00Cannes 2011 #1: Defense de woufby Ryland Walker Knight<center><b><br />I.</b><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5709053331/" title="CANNES: DÉJUNER by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2077/5709053331_fc669bebe1.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="CANNES: DÉJUNER"></a><i><br />Lazy lunch</i><br /><b><br />II.</b><br /><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23574183?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0"></iframe><i><br />I went up a hill to take some stills<br />and look what I did find</i><br /><b><br />III.</b><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5709617542/" title="CANNES: D'EGLISE by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3204/5709617542_c1605804e3.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="CANNES: D'EGLISE"></a><i><br />Postcard point of view</i></center>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-60361445578262921272011-05-08T09:30:00.002-07:002015-03-04T13:28:19.460-08:00SFIFF54 #5: Hear the words in here out thereby Ryland Walker Knight<center><br />
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5661225985/" title="Onlookers on by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5263/5661225985_3c184c7e8b.jpg" width="500" height="314" alt="Onlookers on"></a></center><br />
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Toronto's own <a target="_blank" href="http://cinema-scope.com/wordpress/cs-online/sfiff-2011-encounters-at-the-end-of-the-world-2/">Adam Nayman</a> as he was in San Francisco on FIPRESCI jury duty for the festival. One of the fruitful conversations we shared was about Kelly Reichardt and her new movie, <i><b>Meek's Cutoff</b></i>, which, at first, made me madder than a snake. <i>(What're spoilers?)</i> The finest point to point at in my reaction to the film is its ending, which is exactly the kind of storytelling move that I've grown to detest: that seemingly open-ended "grace note" that feels if not over-determined then a cop-out. I complained to another friend that, if you're going to write a story about life and death consequences (risking starvation) on the road to the frontier, then you ought to make some real choices about trajectory, about what those consequences mean; and that it appeared Reichardt "copped out" on any such choices by opting for a "mystic allegory" that makes the film's alarmingly literal lefty slant unavoidable and, well, without argument beyond what I already know about how confused and confusing humans can be. That is, the political element is as rootless as the characters, awash in reaction not conviction. After all, the majority of the film made me angry because the way Meek is characterized—the ignorant blow hard wearing a red shirt quick to beat The Other he refuses to grant any value, let alone agency—leaves little room for interpretation outside allegory when met at first glance (1). But I must admit that not only was I rapt through the plodding but also that I marvel at Reichardt's gift for film grammar and staging. And, yes, that, while grimacing my way through the post-screening talks, trying and failing to bite my angry tongue, I tried to add to every exchange that I did not trust my basic reaction because it felt reductive and far too broad (funny how those dovetail!) for a film this specific. <br />
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When Adam and I started talking about the film a few days later nobody had presented any kind of argument to get me out of my funk with the film. I still explained the anger in terms of expecting the ending: <i>"In that reverse shot through the trees, looking at the Indian, before the penultimate one of Williams, I was thinking, Please don't do it, and then you get Williams' face—did you realize her lips are perfect no matter what?—and she's all 'confused' or whatever before the final reverse, this time with less leaves, and I kept thinking, Don't fucking do it, and then it starts down, starts to fade, and I'm a riot inside, just totally, You fucking did it, didn't you? And I wanted to bolt from the theatre."</i> Adam's reply was as simple as it was brilliant, one of those, ouch, I-should-breathe-better moments where your jaw doesn't drop but your mouth does open. He asked, "Does it matter that it's Williams' point of view, looking through those trees, to you?" My head went click and thud, my eyes widened and I said, "Huh, well, okay. Yes, of course that matters. How did I not think of that?" It's not like that question precipitated a complete reversal but it did open a new way to appreciate the film, or, at the very least, a way to let my useless anger abate. Because I'm still not sold on it, nor Reichardt, though I do like being forced to think about a movie, about a filmmaker, about my criteria, about myself. Thinking about thinking and thinking about how you are thinking are rather indulgent modes, I suppose, but that's all I understand criticism to be at bottom. Or, that's the kind of philosophical criticism I'm attracted to: the kind that brings intentionality into play while guiding a reader through one's experience of an object. I realize that ideal is not always possible, or desirable.<center><br />
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5662113828/" title="There is nothing as hideous as criteria based on emotion. by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5108/5662113828_726e6e5eab.jpg" width="500" height="340" alt="There is nothing as hideous as criteria based on emotion."></a></center><br />
Part of what makes it im<i>probable</i> is that sense of duty a critic feels inside a festival's screening schedule not only to see as many films as possible but also to have something to say about all those free tickets she's received (2). "Duty" may be the wrong word, however, when what's really motivating me (I can only speak for me) is that I simply like going to the movies. But, in turn, I guard that enthusiasm by not going to the movies. (In fact, after <i><b>Meek's</b></i>, I only saw five films of the fifteen I'd planned (via iCal) to see. There were a lot of reasons, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted to watch basketball more than I wanted to watch movies. Luckily, this is something Adam is amenable to since he is, among other things, a big basketball fan as well. We will return to this.) Which gives me pause on the eve of my first visit to the Cannes Film Festival. I'm in Nice writing this and though my fatigued body wants to stay inside and lay down or get into some stretching, my brain wants to push that body outdoors as often as possible to feel a different sun and speak a different language walking around a city I do not know. Granted, I'll have a running mate in Danny at the festival and I don't doubt some odd kind of competition will push me to see more and write more than normal. Yet, no matter how flat out cool it is to the fan in me that I get to participate in this festival this year, the sun will always tempt me. Which is another motivating factor to pump out this post to wrap up my SFIFF54.<br />
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Thus, to regain the thread: I enjoyed Adam's question of perspective because it brought back a rather basic question I'd forgotten in the haze my eyes had created, reacting to the simple story onscreen in <i><b>Meek's</b></i>. Because that is the great thing at work in the film: bringing this woman's eyes to the fore. Her gaze may not be clear, or always level, but she's the moral rock of the picture and by the close she has, in fact, been brought from the back of the wagon ditching heirlooms to the center of the frame with a voice and a face for all to reckon. This reading, too, is reductive of course. But I'd much rather value the film for its picture of a woman emerging than disparage a film for its (by my lights) lazy storytelling. Reichardt may not be interested in story the same way I am, I must allow, since she has a certain a-g background that speaks to interests in space and time (both paramount abstractions here), but the fact is she chose to make a narrative feature that is only ever subtle in its patient formal craft, not its ideas, and that still bugs me. Then again, all three of Reichardt's Oregon pictures are on the cynic's side of the table and part of my problem may simply be my desire for a more generous world, my desire to see some new way towards charity. Put otherwise, I know I rate magnanimous movies higher for their obvious alignment with my own values. This may be selfish.<center><br />
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This is also why I love something like Claire Denis' <i><b><a target="_blank" href="http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/560">35 Rhums</a></b></i>, which is nothing if not charitable. So imagine my thrill to meet Stuart Staples of Tindersticks prior to their event at the festival, adding a live score to a sort-of clip-reel of films they have worked on with Mme Denis. Our chat was brief but I can assure that Mr Staples is a gentle and patient man. He talked about a duty, too, he feels to the object at hand, to do right by it by the end of the process. On their first score with Mme Denis, for <i><b>Nenette et Boni</b></i>, he said the band had the idea that they would follow in Miles Davis' footsteps by trying to play live to the images, to be real jazz musicians, before they realized it would take time to find apt melodies and write real songs where needed. Now, he says, they get ideas earlier thanks to the script and dailies but it really takes seeing a rough assembly to have the kind of emotional reaction necessary to inspire his/their/that responsibility to the object that can produce such wonders as the delicate, lilting rhymes of the opening image-and-score tandem of <i><b>35 Rhums</b></i>, where the train and its tracks shuffle a bit in time with the accordion. Or the title track from the soundtrack to <i><b>Trouble Every Day</b></i>, which was a highlight of the live performance (3) along with the song "Tiny Tears" from that first partnership on <i><b>Nenette et Boni</b></i>. Lucky for us, somebody talented shot that part of the show, its finale, and put it on youtube:<center><br />
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It was a low-key event. But it was certainly more about the concert than it was about the visuals (or the interplay between stage and screen) from my vantage. Which is fine, of course, since I feel privileged to live in one of the two U.S. tour stops for the show. And the music is really great, no matter how much I wanted to re-order things or at least open with more of a bang than that (admittedly lovely) shot of Alice Houri floating in the pool near the front of <i><b>N&B</b></i>. So I'll quit that tact by saying, Thanks.<br />
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Some other things I was grateful to catch on a big screen before departure include: Ben Russell's <i><b>Trypps #7</b></i>, which really did start <a target="_blank" href="http://fest11.sffs.org/films/film_details.php?id=25">its shorts program</a> with a bang (or a bong, or a gong), as it took me forever to figure out we were looking in a mirror at that lady's face stay placid in the quivering frame; T.Marie's <i><b>Slave Ship</b></i> was projected smaller than the rest of the series but it still impressed the hell out of me because it flips the "watching paint dry" quip into something productive, forcing us to see an image not take shape but explore its own variance; <i><b>The Mill and The Cross</b></i> by Lech Majewski is somewhat confounding, especially from the 2nd row, but its palate is wide and deep and its ideas, though rooted in the narrative structure of the painting, feel yet more modern in how arrayed (not inter-related) they are, but then maybe Breugel was just ahead of his time (in any case I was too tired to offer a more cogent take); Michelangelo Frammartino’s <i><b>Le Quattro Volte</b></i> is by turns cute and brilliant, with far more whimsy than any note could prepare me for, which isn't a bad thing since we should welcome some levity inside a largely wordless observation on cycles of life (it's not Disney, ok, though its like-minded brevity is a blessing) that still exist outside cities; Breillat's <i><b>The Sleeping Beauty</b></i> is nowhere near Disney and so full of stuff that I can't say what I think other than I like how she sees a dream life in a similar way to Lynch on a thematic level if nowhere close on a stylistic or formal level; and, finally, that big bad momma of some smoke and a shitload of mirrors, RWF's <i><b>World on a Wire</b></i>.<center><br />
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Believe me, I'm sorry to have missed plenty, but at the least I saw this large-scale goof of a thesis on modernity that's so funny and smart it's hard to believe people get daunted by its size. It's the kind of movie all cinephiles will enjoy, if not adore, and the kind they can never sell to non-movie-people they love. The running time is unavoidable in any description one might try to entice with due, in part, to the fact that the film just keeps getting better as it goes along, accruing incidents of insanity designed for maximum punchline effect. The gambit is easy enough, though, and largely ripped off: there's a government-funded project to build a computer world that mimics our own with a series of programmers, each holding the (invisible marionette) strings on fabricated subjects, going mad when they realize the very apocryphal truth of their own reality. Sounds familiar, huh? Well part of the joy in the thing is precisely its lower case, 16mm filmmaking that relies on performance and structure and sound design with very minimal set decoration to get at a sense of a future just past our present (even if the costumes are unmistakably 1973)—as well as a world enveloping itself. I'm astounded this is only the second Fassbinder film I've seen. But that just gives me another autodidact project, among so many, for after Cannes.<br />
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The trick is to step out of such impulses, though, when you're in a foreign country (4) (5) and look how I've failed today, spilling so many words. Whatever, I say; I say, my body saw the sun this morning—for a stroll to the market and beyond, for a lunch in the park and for a snack on the patio at my hotel with the owner. So out I go again, hoping for a cheap pizza and some good wine on a sidewalk where I can watch people in clean clothes try their best to act like they don't have a million eyes on them at all times, or actually convince themselves their lover's the only one looking at them—and only them!—in the world.<center><br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5698500285/" title="NICE by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2281/5698500285_9fa9721f52.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="NICE"></a><i><br />
—Happy Mothers Day, moms</i></center><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(1) He's an easy Bush stand-in, if I must use that name, and Michelle Williams' character has a line of dialog that only helps cement this link: "I don't know if he's ignorant or just plain evil."<br />
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(2) Not to mention the fact that you want to ply press people with clips to quiet at least one chorus of voices ringing in one corner of one ear.<br />
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(3) However, the selection of the man-eating scene was, as S.S. promised, shocking. Even when you see that scene in the context of the greater film it's brutal, gross and nigh gratuitous. Here, it rankled more than most and, again, I looked away for the duration, though that didn't spare me the sounds of the horny young dude screaming and choking and bleeding to death.<br />
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(4) I'll be in Europe for a while post-Cannes.<br />
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(5) That's the trick anywhere, I think, which is part of the point of <i><b>World on a Wire</b></i>: you should want to want your own body, you should want to live in it, you should want to move it and slap windows with delight at movement and light. </span>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-70088402746745043792011-05-06T03:30:00.001-07:002011-05-06T06:43:30.128-07:00Convergence for your barreling without blinders (5/6/11)by Ryland Walker Knight<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.field.io/project/digitalpaintings"><img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/128/1335162/fieldio_7_905.jpg" width="500"></a><br /><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://decapitateanimals.tumblr.com/post/4502195383/they-put-their-hands-together-and-their-voices-scream"><img src="http://decapitateanimals.taokitamoto.dk/75/alfredhitchcock_tippihedren.jpg" width="500"></a><i><br />—On and up and forward!</i></center>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8347718.post-38469681161747867992011-04-26T11:00:00.003-07:002011-04-30T09:46:43.721-07:00SFIFF54 #4: A Useful Lifeby Ryland Walker Knight<center><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryknight/5658576575/" title="La vida util by ryknight55, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5309/5658576575_d8d01fe7bc.jpg" width="500" alt="La vida util"></a></center><br />Federico Veiroj's <i><b>A Useful Life</b></i> is a black and white short feature (only 67 minutes) that doesn't need your eyes to be excellent but your eyes could only help its cause since its main point is a flip on the title of <a target="_blank" href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/3024">Dave Kehr's new book</a>: movies matter. Not only that, our reparatory houses matter no matter what somebody with a microphone* tells you. Matter of fact, this movie's got rather simple aims but it's also got enough love for the movies that any cinephile will likely fall in love with it. The style echoes Bresson's presentational purity (<i>this</i> desk, <i>this</i> bag, <i>this</i> staircase) and the film is full of so many references that they're too many to name here** but the two that matter most are pretty tough to miss. <br /><br />First, as hinted by a title card up front (the entire credits precede the film), there's a speech culled from Mark Twain about lying and the value of lying in a world of lies delivered by our main man from the cinematheque, Jorge (played by Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek), in a law classroom when he nods, "Yes," to the query, "Are you the substitute teacher?" He finishes his speech (I wish I could quote it or find the passage online) as the real substitute teacher enters the classroom and leaves without confrontation. No one stops him. No one should. Besides, he's not the only one having fun in the scene: the student who asked him to take a role he was not meant for understands his practical joke and she laughs from her front row seat. <br /><br />The second quote involves our man, alone, on a white staircase, trying out some Fred Astaire moves—up and down and around the steps—making himself smile for a good few minutes in an unbroken shot. It's truly a joyful moment, his movements filling the frame with an energy of something like discovery and everything like pleasure; that is, he's having a ball playing with this world. But it's not cloying because our man is more clumsy than graceful, moving in spurts, his hands still as slack at his sides as when he trudges Montevideo's streets or the hallways of his dying/dead home of cinema. It's not learning how to walk—he does that fine—, it's learning how to make use of what he learned in the dark, which is as good a classroom for life as any other arena. After all, the pick up line that works for Jorge isn't, "Care for a coffee?" Rather, with a bunch of teeth flashing: "Want to see a movie?"<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">* or an impressive New York apartment, or a lot of cash to withhold, or an institution's denial of said funds to hide behind<br /><br />** in part because I could not tell you what other movies were mined for a lot of the sweeping score on the soundtrack</span>Ryland Walker Knighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09233954424885027837noreply@blogger.com0