SFIFF54 #4: A Useful Life

by Ryland Walker Knight

Federico Veiroj's A Useful Life 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 Dave Kehr's new book: 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 (this desk, this bag, this 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.

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.

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?"

* or an impressive New York apartment, or a lot of cash to withhold, or an institution's denial of said funds to hide behind

** in part because I could not tell you what other movies were mined for a lot of the sweeping score on the soundtrack

Viewing Log #27: Here we go again [12/28/09 - 1/3/10]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Get your atlas

• Les dames du Bois du Bologne [Robert Bresson, 1945] Somehow had never seen this one yet. Definitely stands out from the others with its professional actors, but the timing and the cynicism are the same. Sure, we reach a moment of grace, too, however you can't say Bresson exactly trusts people. Some beautiful mise-en-scène, as ever, as well, like the moment I tried to replicate below (gifs don't always work...) and every scene with a car. The start-stop will-he-go post-nuptial back-and-forth breakdown is about as perfect a visual representation of Jean's idiocy as imaginable.
  
  
• Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans [Werner Herzog, 2009] This isn't a conversion, nor a remake. But boy is it good and fun. Cage is beyond "good" here (on the good-to-bad scale), and I'd like to think it's something about the hairdo, first, that gets it going. More surprising, though, is what Steve already alluded to: at bottom this is a love story. Just makes me wish Eva Mendes was a better actress; Werner can only do so much. In any case, I really wish it had a different title if only becuse then we wouldn't be forced to compare it to Abel's movie. That said, what else are you gonna call it? —Iguana cam is the best joke of the year?
  
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou [Wes Anderson, 2004] # So special. Made me feel lonely, but also whole, which is nice; I think that's the goal with these fableish jamborees Wes makes. Such a true image movie, too, with all that (pace DC) unmoored madness. Easily Wes' freest film. And just about every line of dialogue is a zinger, a knee-slapper. [BTW: I put it on my list of Five Favorite Comedies of the 00s, hosted by my buds Mike and Sean at the Metro Classics blog.]
  
  
• Star Trek [J.J. Abrams, 2009] So much lens flare it's hilarious. And so much bathos lit like that that it almost becomes real pathos. I won't lie: it was really easy to get wrapped up in, and buy into, because the cast is good and the storytelling damned efficient and the "cool factor" is pretty spot on. The coolest thing, though, is the conceit of "alternate realities" as a way to address the new cast reboot ballyhoo. This Abrams guy may not know how to shoot anything, but he sure does know about structure, and myths.

—The light that failed

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.]

Viewing Log #21: Bleed heat by night [11/16/09 - 11/22/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Bring yourself, roll

• Curb Your Enthusiasm, 7th Season [Larry David, 2009] Hard to beat "The Table Read," no doubt, among so many episodes this season, but, once again, LD proves how smart he is about people's petty shit and everybody's desire for a fairytale—despite knowing all too well that most things in life, as it turns out, aren't just jokes but lies. Or, a house of cards and red herrings. I feel like a human again.
  
• The White Ribbon [Michael Haneke, 2009] Almost exactly what I expected, but it's the first Haneke film I've wanted to see a second time. The film's ambiguities, in ways I've not felt from this hectoring hooey hocker's work before, feel ambiguous. Since I'm still sussing the political-historical mumbo jumbo, my perhaps-predictable excitement is primarily perceptible: Haneke's digital shift is an aesthetic tool, strictly technological, to register the world in luminescent darkness even more stunning than Public Enemies's wood-bound fire-fight. This light doesn't dazzle, though dazzle it does; rather, in these corridors and on these farms, light and its lack seep and spread, hint even, or slab the world into a plastic fresco at noon. A field of wheat waving is gorgeous, of course, but so is the older brother in the corner, his nightgown a ghostgown and his head missing in the shadows. We're left with voices, and contours. I could watch this movie outside, eating cheese next summer, and be okay.
  
  
• Je t'aime, je t'aime [Alain Resnais, 1968] The stutter of time, and proof of proofs that you don't need "special effects" to make great, hard Sci-Fi. However, it's also "Sci-Fi" in that it's a film of referentiality, and of an index, of how top-down maps don't work (and least of all with the brain). A heart-soul, however invisible, lives in dimensions. More in a separate post soon.
  
• Mouchette [Robert Bresson, 1967] # Anybody who calls Bresson boring is, like, the worst. This movie, though hard, is, like, the best. Here the cinema (or maybe just the camera?) poaches life, or can; here the cinema captures spirits, or uses them; here the cinema clacks at the world. It's stubborn, like its subject, and everything's a row. DVD can't help it, as Bresson's cinema desires celluloidal textures felt by the flicker first, but the extras are pretty great on this Criterion disc. (Godard's trailer, for instance, is a treasure.) And I know in my bones that all I got when I saw the film at Film Forum ages ago was that, shucks, the world is rotten. Now I want to read some Baudelaire, and never slap any body.
  
  
• The Magnificent Ambersons [Orson Welles, 1942] Big admission: this was the first time. What a doozy and dizzy quilt of a movie. Even though you can see some seams, it's still wholly fascinating, and surprisingly touching. Matter of fact, it's super sad. —Boy did I hate that guy who wouldn't quit guffawing at the so-perceived anachronisms. Just because its about history doesn't make it a relic itself. I could, and maybe should, watch this movie a ton. Definitely one of the great "house movies" in movies.
  
  
• Muriel [Alain Resnais, 1963] # Still knotty, still devastating, always too fast. A blink of a movie containing so much in its elisions. Here's the jump cut, for Heaven's sake. More, still, back here.

—Marked by lightness, a shining shroud

Viewing Log #6: After midnight, searching [8/3/09 - 8/9/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Whatever this world can give to me

• Notorious [Alfred Hitchcock, 1946] # Yearning to hear those words, to find a way back from poison, how to restore faith. He says it early: Actions speak louder.
  
• The Leopard Man [Jacques Tourneur, 1943] Fine vignettes of terror to instigate a lot of early "gaze" theory, but it doesn't hang together all that well. Still, each "hunt" is gripping and frightful.
  
• Who Killed Who? [Tex Avery, 1943] Sunday morning cartoons discovered on youtube after reading a Rosenbaum entry way too early. I made note of these over on the tumblr microsite. Watching these in kind of rapid succession kind of gave me a headache but I was laughing a lot, too.
  
• The Shooting of Dan McGoo [Tex Avery, 1945] click
  
• Red Hot Riding Hood [Tex Avery, 1943] click
  
• Little Rural Red Riding Hood [Tex Avery, 1949] click
  
  
• Duplicity [Tony Gilroy, 2009] Not as knotty as some would have you believe, but easily sexy and fun and a little smart and, most surprising, none of it's done with condescension. Gilroy's not hiding any so-called "twist," either, with that credit sequence finger pointing or the emerging ("fractal") structure.
  
  
• I Love You Man [John Hamburg, 2009] About as apt a double bill as can be imagined. This movie makes me feel good and I'm not ashamed one iota. I don't care if it's a simple thing; it works. Maybe more words will come of this.
  
• Shaun of the Dead [Edgar Wright, 2004] # "Alright, gay..." There's a real picture of friendship couched inside this zom-rom-com, which makes it easy for me to get nostalgic for a few worlds I've lived in (not just the most recently departed). But, beyond that, it was nice to see again how smart the movie really is at all events. —So many long takes!
  
  
• The Body Snatcher [Robert Wise, 1944] Just the beginning bit. Karloff is great, but I was tired and the Tourneur is real hard to follow. (In fact, I looked back at the zombies instead.)
  
• I Walked with a Zombie [Jacques Tourneur, 1943] # Hadn't seen since seeing those Costa pictures. What a tight, humble movie. What night, what walking, what tall grass and what big eyes. In what darkness do we see?
  
  
• A Man Escaped [Robert Bresson, 1956] # As hopeful as anything. Like comfort food, only healthier.
  
  
• The Curse of the Cat People [Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, 1944] Kind of silly, though occasionally pretty. No real consequences here.
  
• Cat People [Jacques Tourneur, 1942] # A standby for all time. The dimensions of desire are deep and wide and violent. More said with pictures.

Convergence for your ramparts [ ii ] (7/14/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

ii. ces vieux sont toujours jeunes; ils vivront sans cesse