Viewing Log #25: Get on the bus [12/14/09 - 12/20/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

• North by Northwest [Alfred Hitchcock, 1959] # All in all, a gas. Simply one of the most fun movies of all time. And smart, too. Stanley Cavell would have you believe that this picture, by consistently referencing Hamlet, is Hitch telling you he's as good at making movies as Shakespeare was at writing plays. If you run with the idea that, as a film obsessed with performance, and whose plot spurs on from a poisoning at town's end, in a hamlet called Glen Cove, as we see "TOWNSEND" spelled on screen and pronounced "Towns-end" by Grant, then this makes sense.
  
  
• Paprika [Satoshi Kon, 2006] # Trippy and funny and scary, as ever. I still want Soft Pack to remix the opening credits song.
  
  
• Vertigo [Alfred Hitchcock, 1958] # Too bad the print was a 1996 restoration antique and some scenes were too dark. But, still, gorgeous and haunting, as ever. Danny said, "Every single shot is sad." And he's right. Jimmy-Scottie's the worst detective in the world and it shows right off the bat—he even says so!—"It's not my line..."—which makes us complicit in the worst case of not-seeing this side of Jim Crow. My entire body hurt walking out of this one this time.
  
• Avatar [James Cameron, 2009] More to come in a dedicated post both for the simple fact that it might garner some traffic and also because I thought the thing was, well, kind of awesome. And, just watch, it'll win Best Picture. [click here]
  
  
• Au hasard Balthazar [Robert Bresson, 1966] # Sometimes I feel compelled to immediately watch some Bresson after some Hitchcock. Can't explain it. But this movie rules, duh. I fell asleep almost instantaneously.
  
• Marnie [Alfred Hitchcock, 1964] # Still so frightening. That shot of Marnie's mom ill-lit atop the stairs, beckoning her to dinner, gives me shivers as she struggles back down those stairs, one shuffle-grunt at a time. The print was beautiful. [A quick hit.]
  
  
• Law of Desire [Pedro Almodovar, 1987] # Genuinely sad and maybe Pedro's best movie. I continue to find it hilarious how America never understood the real treasure that is Antonio Banderas: he's completely crazy. There's a reason Pedro kept casting him as an amor loco. He's so pretty that you believe he's dumb enough to follow his heart to such idiotic, devoted, mostly unrequited ends each and every time.
  
  
• La guerre est finie [Alain Resnais, 1966] A dead-end, all dopey with dreams of revolution long since calcified; nobody works for good, or achieves much of it. All the game's a jumble. The young bend around anarchy and the old hold tight old night moves. Yves Montand just beds babes with a frown and talks around his life, one scene using one name and then another scene plying another name, eventually slipping nearer that grave he's evaded so long. His star, his guiding light so he says, is fading with the age. [Here's the final '09 recherche.]

Memory made material: Millennium Actress

by Ryland Walker Knight

I don't know much about anime, per se, nor do I know much about film history, per se, but I know plenty about both to know that Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress is one of the best movies I've seen about either subject. Beyond that, Kon's film is simply one of the best movies about movies I've seen, even if it's a little film. Almost immediately after I finished watching the film I wrote this in an email to a friend: "Half as long and twice as incandescent (maybe), it's an apt Janus companion to INLAND EMPIRE." That's as good a pullquote as I can give you. The bigger argument is congruous with Kon's Paprika (and Lynch's film): life is movies because movies make memory material. What strikes me as more impressive about Millennium Actress, and what links it to Lynch's film, is that it goes a step further to say life is acting, which is the material of movies. Both movies go on to complicate this premise by their relationship to their lead actresses, but let's stick to the premise for now, due to my lack of time today. (Also of note: the wood of the actress' home, that build its beams and its cabinets, makes time, and hence memories, a material framework in Kon's picture.) The difference between the two artists, and their art, is that there is a giddiness -- a delight! -- amidst the perils of the adventure, for Kon; David Lynch is funny, but that man sees scarier demons than most would like to look at. Most of the magic in Kon's film is in the editing, and how the images move (or appear to move), so these stills can't quite do the film justice. Still, I thought I'd share some images that stuck out for me. (Plus, here's a kinda cheesy trailer.)








[C'mon, this last image parodies me, right?]

Return to the movies, return to the world: Ratatouille and Paprika at The House and some notes about me, as if you cared.

by Ryland Walker Knight

[To read the essay, click here, and you will be forwarded to The House Next Door.]

02007: 110 minutes: written and directed by Brad Bird
02006: 90 minutes: dir. Satoshi Kon: written by Kon & Seishi Minakami, from a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui

[A large chunk of mostly unedited text from a late-night email to Keith about the essay, and my writing of late in general:]

I thought long and hard at certain points today about your advice about making sure this new authority I've assumed in my developing voice is all me and not simply a theory from elsewheres laid smack dab onto each new film I watch. I like to think it is all me. I'm just developing my skills to articulate myself better, to the point where I think I am comfortable with my work. I understand there's a certain strain of academia in my recent writings but I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing. Also, I find it annoying that "academic" is a pejorative in the film criticism world, you know? I think I'm just trying to write thoughtful, engaged essays. I know it's a little more than what our developed audience at The House is looking for from time to time (ahem) but I also think my writing is pretty easy to follow -- pretty readable -- despite it's, uh, "headiness" as you put it.

This is also why I've basically stopped work on the "Ryland's Repertory Corner" column ideas: My whole approach to criticism has been evolving at a more and more rapid rate since returning to school and I think I've simply found what it is I find limiting and unsatisfying about some of my earlier works, and other critics I like, too. That is, what I want to avoid. And what I want to proffer in response.

As I've said elsewhere, I really didn't start thinking to write anything about movies -- anything critical period outside schoolwork -- until I moved to New York in Fall 05: after buying _The Life Aquatic_ and realizing there was more going on there than I'd given it credit for, I wrote about 1000 words in a document titled "why i paid full price for a dvd of the life aquatic". Then I started posting things on the film geek board where I met Steve and then I started to spill over onto my blogspot address with the _Superman_ thing. And from there I've only ever expanded my horizons. It's been a wild year since that _Superman_ thing. I've grown a lot in the writing and in my life. And I think I've only gotten better.

[Dr. Chiba is the missing ingredient. Make fun all you want, this shit is amazing.]