Farolito Fifty, take two

by Ryland Walker Knight

———

Since this clip probably won't make the cut for what we're working on, here's another test I shot last night. Please do hit up the full screen if you've got the bandwidth.

Convergence for your bawdy daze (10/20/10)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Unbroken anyways

Light Lines

by Ryland Walker Knight

—in.
Way back when I said my favorite art "forces you to rethink space, and how light rhymes." I think that has stayed true. Now I'd say my attraction to geometry is something about control, and limits, and maybe even the limits of control (despite Jim Jarmusch's own way-back-machine movie from last year). The point is that I enjoy that order, though I also want to bend it, jam it, crowd it. Above all, as ever, selection is key; i.e., how we frame things matters. I'd like to think these selections show how I feel San Francisco to be a complicated, at times over-determined space. The more I live in this city, the more it feels horizontal, yet it's got hills on end. Seems every corner you turn in this city you'll get a new horizon, a new angle—and in such a small sweep! See more of my SFMOMA trip in this flickr set.


—up.


—down.


—around.

Get your verdant going electric.

by Ryland Walker Knight

—When I click this...
Like Broken Embraces, you know exactly what you're getting from Avatar. Yet, with Pedro Almodovar, you only get about five great images and one classic finale sight-meld that changes perception. With Cameron's film, a visionary chunk of neon folly if ever there was one, almost every second behind those 3-D goggles got my eyeballs going gaga and groggy with gorgeous goof city grand larceny light shows of gigantic gestures all swooped and folded and lit up beyond pure spectacle into something truly immersive. I was wiped, wiping my eyes walking out of that early-AM, first-possible IMAX showing Friday morning. It's about as tiring an epic as has come out since that other great film of the decade about embodiment, Pirates 2 (and, yes, No. 3, which is more tiring but not quite as good).

By now you probably know what Cameron's movie is about (bad military, good natives; yawn), so I don't need to waste your time with the waste of time story highlights. Rather, we ought to focus on the real excuse for this behemoth: to light your eyeballs full of a frenzy. Because, it goes without saying, though everybody will/has, James Cameron cannot write for shit, has no political sensibility other than guilt, and wouldn't know how to differentiate between myth and cliché if asked in the right (pointed) way. What he can do is make a few images, and build a movie, however silly, with all kinds of cool tools. He's also been pointed in the right direction of a few bits of theory, it seems, and knows a few things not just about feminism but also about game design and, um, phenomenology. At heart, his story is about seeing as a physical action, a full-bodied embrace of the material world. Again: embodiment. I have to admit that, despite what (little) I knew about the whole "stereoscopic" mumbo jumbo Cameron supposedly invented (and the title, duh), I didn't see that one coming. Or, at least I did not expect it to be that explicit—nor for it to work.

You expect Pedro Almodovar, in a movie about a now-blind filmmaker, to make the phenomenological film that moves you, not James Cameron. But, save that final image, and Penelope Cruz's force-of-nature performance, nothing really moved me, though a few things tickled me, as much as any number of sights in Avatar. Physically moved, too: I found myself fudging the 3-D by having to shift my body and cock my head from side to side from time to time just to cope with all that gooey phosphorescence on screen. WIth Pedro's film, I just kept wanting more screen time for that goddess, no matter the narrative cost. See, Pedro's still hung up on plot. But he's only got a few of them to rely on, and the record-skip repeat of this movie is nearly tiring; or, it is whenever Penelope isn't dazzling the frame. All Cameron has to do is push a few motes forward in the "frame" (space? his term, "volume"?) and I get a thrill. That said, only a few of the compositions from the full film linger in my head. It's more about the fluidity of the space, and the visceral invitation it offers, than it is strictly about pictures. In that, I think Sicinski's onto something with that three-tweet rave (starts here) about "making plot just what it should be: an excuse to go nuts on viewers' skulls."

—From here!
Last year I had a similar positive reaction to Speed Racer, but I know that movie, though maybe more adventurous, is nowhere near as successful. It's a little too cut-out cartoony, and its timing is all off. Say what you will, and I know it's long (and there's no getting around that, of course), but Avatar never drags. It just weighs a ton for a fleet film. And that's because it expects your eyes to do things they're not used to doing. —Least of all in a multiplex! In any event, this rapture, though felt, is still nothing compared to the sheer joy of Fantastic Mr. Fox. There's a film jam-packed with detail to keep you pinballing around the frame for daze on end, every frame a treat—and all in under 90 minutes. But that's another story for another time. (Maybe later in the week.) For now, I'm just adding my ramble to the ruckus out there, getting giddy at the thought of fluorescent aerial jellyfish and all kinds of eco-electrical networks of lights to make me and you and everyone dizzy with dumb grins. What a gift!


[Broken Embraces opened on one screen, at the Clay, last Friday here in the Bay Area and will roll out to more screens on Christmas. Avatar's everywhere. Neither needs my endorsement to make oodles of cash. Though, of course, one will make yet more oodles than the other.]

Quick Plug: Medicine for Melancholy

by Ryland Walker Knight

Last Thursday I had the pleasure, first, to finally see Barry Jenkins' debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, and, second, to meet Barry briefly alongside the film's star (also a Daily Show correspondent), Wyatt Cenac. They proved as affable as their film and it came as no shock that Barry named three lady filmmakers as his favorites, whose influence one can trace in his work: VINYL-favorites Claire Denis and Lynne Ramsay as well as another we here would like to know more about (that is, we would like to see something), but have not yet encountered, Lucrecia Martel. And while I've not seen a Martel film, if pressed I would say that what ties these three filmmakers is their interest in the cinema of sensations, or impressions, built from oblique (yet discrete) moments. There is a delicious passage in Medicine for Melancholy where our leads, Cenac's Micah and Tracey Heggins' Jo, jump aboard a carrousel that can easily be seen (for all its yummy and tender singularity) as bearing a certain tradition's stamp. However, this film's image, made with digital cameras fronted by "old" SLR lenses and pushed in post towards a sepia hue, tends to bleed light in a way more akin to what Jia Zhang-Ke and Yu Lik-wai capture with their kino-eyes. And, like Jia's films, Barry's is definitely about witnessing a space (here San Francisco instead of, say, the World Park) and how its angles and complexities play out in both the private and public spheres, and what's available in both those arenas. Medicine builds into this project an often-angry portrait of how unwelcoming the upper-middle-class skew of San Francisco's demographic can be to its marginal residents, and specifically how one young black guy can't shake his anxieties during what has to be one of the most blissfully ignorant 24 hours of his young life.

It's a love story, see? Only, not so much one of those everlasting kind of things. More like one of those, "This is a one night stand," she says, kind of things. It's about naive assumptions, about willful ignorance to look beyond your lap, about youthful indiscretions many of us have indulged for better or (more likely) worse. It's a really lovely thing to watch. Especially since its vision of young San Francisco is shockingly similar to the one I recently left behind. For instance, Micah and Jo go dancing at the Knockout where we see the guys behind Elbo Room's Saturday Soul Night spinning 45's. (For the record: Barry confirmed in the post-screening Q'n'A that these dudes were spinning their usuals but for the sake of consistency he scored the dancing to "indie stuff"...)

The film opened yesterday at the IFC Center here in NYC with plans to roll out across the country, which you can check up with at this website. So go see it. It may not be earth-shattering but it's easily a lovely, thorny letter to a city I miss and a lot of its often-annoying problems, including but not limited to the consistent shunting of any people of color. I'd love to say more, and dig in, but plenty have already so for more reviews, consult the guru Hudson right here. I just felt good that night so, well, I thought I'd repay the favor and say, Thanks, one more time. I hope all you VINYL readers in the Bay who have yet to see the film (that is, I know Michael was hip before us all) will track it down. I'd love to hear what you have to say. If anything, it'll make you smile with pride that Micha's right: San Francisco is beautiful, and you shouldn't (in fact you do not) have to have money to enjoy that. Here's the tasty trailer: