Viewing Log #55: September highlights

by Ryland Walker Knight

• demonlover [Olivier Assayas, 2002] Look at this twitpic, and then read Glenn's thing maybe. Here, again, I risk the wrath of GK, and Kent Jones: it's a hoot, and largely fascinating, but also the owner of a rather empty punchline.
  
• The Social Network [David Fincher, 2010] A problematic, thoroughly entertaining film I hope I never have to talk to anybody about ever again.
  
• The Thin Red Line [Terrence Malick, 1998] # Here's some gushing and here's some mush-mouth. It's important to me.
  
• The Last Picture Show [Peter Bogdonavich, 1971] As formal as it gets and so, so apt to anybody with an ear for confusion. You know, everybody.
  
• A Brighter Summer Day [Edward Yang, 1991] Worth every minute. Loved how much of it's specifically about light, and shining lights (on things) and not seeing because of the lack of light, and how all the big acts of violence happen at night, in low light. If I see it again (and hopefully in a theatre again), I'll take real notes and maybe write a real poem about it.
  
• Pretty much every single episode of Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job [T+E, 2007-2010] # Cuz I had to. And cuz I love it. Cuz they're the best. (Sure, it gets/got tiresome; but who gives a turd ya dingus?)
  
• The Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job Crimbus Special and Tour Promo [T+E, 2010] The best thing in the world. Everything.
  
• Enter The Void [Gaspar Noé, 2009] I tried to be positive at this joint and largely failed.
  
• The first half of Season Three of The Sopranos [David Chase?, 2001] #, which is absolutely brutal and absolutely fantastic and rather often absolutely hilarious.
  
• Danny Perez's visuals at the Panda Bear show; especially the wave and its square spots at the end.
  
• Oedipus Wrecks [Woody Allen, 1989] A lot of fun, in part because it's "on the nose."
  
• Life Lessons [Martin Scorsese, 1989] Rituals, process, it's all a lie to try to cover your patterns.
  
• Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? [Frank Tashlin, 1957] At the Castro, with Brian. The opening is my favorite part.

Telluride #1: A look ahead.

by Ryland Walker Knight

After a raucous eight hour drive complete with lunch stop in Paonia, I had time for the briefest of showers before our first Symposium function where, among other pleasantries, we were given our schedule for the weekend. Suffice to say, this looks to be fun. This morning and early afternoon are our pretty much our only free time so I thought I'd go ahead and detail what I've got in store ahead. And this is just a sliver of what the festival has to offer this year. Still, I don't think I'll be able to offer precise thoughts on all of this, but I'll give it a shot. Stay tuned.
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Friday: Most of the afternoon will be spent with the symposium, talking to Ken Burns, Peter Sellars and Paolo Cherchi-Usai. Linda Williams said Burns and Sellars have something of a spiel to impart but she hope we'll be able to ask some questions, and that we'll definitely have the opportunity for good conversation with Cherchi-Usai. Given his involvement with Kevin's project, I hope I can ask him about the role of criticism in film history, and preservation, beyond the obvious "more eyes can't hurt" argument. After that there's the "Opening Night Feed" with the rest of the town. Tonight we get to see Waltz With Bashir (dig) and A Private Century (a series of short films by Jan Sikl about memory using amateur "home movies").

Saturday: We get started early discussing films with the group before seeing The Last Command (Sternberg, 1928) before a quick lunch and an early afternoon screening of Mike Leigh's new film, Happy-Go-Lucky. In the afternoon we get to talk to one the festival's tributary David Fincher (others: Jean Simmons, Jan Troell, Richard Shickel) and Leigh before evening screenings of Youssou Ndour (a profile of the Senegalese musician and his plight to bridge an understanding of Islam outside "the fundamentalist monopoly of discourse surrounding [his religion]") and Innocence Unprotected, brought to Telluride by Festival Guest Director, Slavoj Zizek (this will be my second Makavejev in a cinema; that essay by Gary Morris is featured in the festival guide).

Sunday: Another early morning discussion followed by the Indian film Firaaq, which Salman Rushdie has accompanied to help promote. Directly after that we get Laughing Til It Hurts, a group of silent comedies presented by Paolo Cherci Usai and his Pordenone Film Festival; this sounds like a real highlight. I hope there's time for a bite to eat before we hit the next film, With a Little Help from Myself (or, translated literally from French as "Help Yourself, and Heaven Will Help You"), from François Dupeyron, director of Monsieur Ibrahim. Our afternoon discussion features Dupeyron and his lead actress Félicité Wouassi first, followed by a conversation with Rushdie and Firaaq's director, Nandita Das. Sunday night ends with a screening of The Fall of Berlin, another Zizek pick.

Monday: Again we discuss over breakfast before our last screening of Nicolas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, another pick by Zizek in his sidebar, "Neglected Noirs." The last official symposium activities are a noon seminar and Labor Day Picnic followed by a two hour block with Zizek to wrap it all up.
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Again, the widget.

Netflix Experiment #4: The Game

by Ryland Walker Knight

The Game uses every technique available to dazzle and thrill and prickle the audience and were it not for the screenplay the film might be worth more than a passing fancy. As is, David Fincher's third film bears all his worst and his best strains, as ever. I don't know of a filmmaker I've wanted to like more whose films, for the most part, over time, depreciate and feel incomplete. I mean, I own Se7en, Fight Club and Panic Room -- but I don't really like myself for it, no matter how good Zodiac is (or is not). (I mean, I like Zodiac fine, it is easily his "best" film, but it plays lopsided and incomplete.) The Game is not a novel story, but I think Fincher knows this, so the film glides along, happy to be a B picture dressed up in A+ sheen. Perhaps that was what made Panic Room such a success (still my "favorite" of his films): it was a taut genre picture without pretension. This picture is all ostentation. Michael Douglas doesn't simply hit bottom to learn his moral lesson -- first he is bankrupted, then he is buried alive and when even that fails he kills himself! However, Douglas is the perfect actor for this kind of put-upon-rich-asshole role, partly because he comes across as a rich asshole off the silver screen. But the bigger reason is he's an underrated actor, like his dad.* He can sell that scene in the truck stand diner where all he can offer for a ride to San Francisco, from the California-Mexico border, is $17 and change. And he can sell the climax, on the rooftop, where he shoots his brother and decides to jump over the edge, drained and destitute. That is, he helps make the movie better, despite the obvious dialogue and all-too-flashy direction. Whatever structural inconsistencies Fincher films exhibit, they all have excellent acting, along with their extraordinary visual sense. Each of his films has a pitch-perfect central performance. Which makes me think he's probably a cool dude. Or, his meticulous visual nature extends to his interactions with actors. Or, just maybe, he's smarter than his movies let on. If anything The Game is worth watching for those two aspects, and Sean Penn's kinetic pop-and-fizz cameos, and Deborah Kara Unger's red bra.

01997: 128 minutes: dir. David Fincher: written by John D Brancato & Michael Ferris

[*: Are they? Or am I making that up? I guess the son won an Oscar and the father was nominated a few times. Nevermind.]

[Editorial note: I don't want this to simply be snark-or-delight but on the day when Antonioni died, which happened to be the day after the day Bergman died, I'm probably holding whatever film I watch, however diversionary and entertaining it may be, to a pretty high standard it will undoubtedly fail to meet. I promise more generosity next time, even if I think the movie is silly and poorly paced and not as good as it should be.]

Zodiac

by Ryland Walker Knight

That David Fincher’s new film, Zodiac, is the first major Hollywood release made entirely through digital means without any tape mediary goes against the film’s entire fascination with paper trails, with tangible proof, with building knowledge. Its being is illusory. This isn’t a film about a serial killer and the terror he wrecked on the greater San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather, it’s a film about how knowledge and identity remain elusive, to the end, even in the face of what appears self-evident truth.

Which is why Zodiac is inherently problematic, yet wholly engaging. Fincher’s films (such as thrillers Panic Room, Fight Club and Se7en) are habitually obsessed with violence first and ideas second, and it’s never been better illustrated than in the halving of Zodiac. In the first half of the picture we’re given non stop serial killer narrative, complete with gruesome murders, inquisitive reporters and the cops assigned to decipher these crimes. And, oddly, the second half is muddier—and better.

Jake Gyllenhaal expertly plays Robert Graysmith, aloof San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist & avid library advocate: our mediator (and surrogate) within the film. Through Graysmith’s obsession with the Zodiac killer, and his elusory trail (footprints, handwriting, scathed victims), we will see the world, and this case file’s particulars, unfold. His first access point is Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.’s physical precision expressing Avery’s mania dazzles), the Chronicle’s crime editorialist with a knack for the scoop and a taste for the sauce. As the case (and time) progresses, Avery disintegrates and fades from the story under the weight of knowledge he perceives to own. In his place, Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo’s paunchy, certain posture belies his sensitive voice) picks up and carries the narrative weight for most of the film’s middle section. Where Avery cherry picks random facts to serve his needs, Toschi is bent on culling coincidences to build an infallible case that hangs together solely for him. Both fail: By foregrounding their investment in the investigation they lose sight of the investigation itself.

Only after the killings are past tense does the film engage thought as an essential process—not only to understand the murders and identify their perpetrator, but how to negotiate and balance our lives. Yet the film is a near-exclusive boy’s room, crowding out the women and minimizing their resonance, thus unbalancing the film and unsettling the audience. But this friction, coupled with the structure’s deferred focus on Graysmith, helps us identify with his confusion in the face of so much jumbled information.

Graysmith, then, is the definitive curator of the film’s knowledge. He’s the only character to use the library, the only one we actually see opening books. His engagement with words defines, and solidifies, his involvement. Also, he is the only man to dialogue with a woman as a peer, his wife Melanie (Chloe Sevigny, always good); he understands his responsibilities, and how he’s failing them. In this, the second half is about how, in identifying the Zodiac, he will reclaim his life.

What’s odd, then, is how Graysmith articulates this identification: by writing a book. All his verbal exchanges lead to more questions, more uncertainty. When presenting his final culmination of research to Toschi, Graysmith is forever shuffling pages, presenting papers, positing printed words as proof. After Graysmith’s expositional monologue, Toschi thanks Graysmith for breakfast and implores him, “Finish the book.” Finishing the book, like the pithy eruption of histories that end the film, will somehow ground reality. But even in the ending, the facts don’t add up and you’re left wondering what truth to believe. Or, is there a truth to believe in? Zodiac, maturely, would have you believe there is—but it’s a scaffolding you erect for yourself, alone.

[The review is supposed to be available here but The Daily Californian's website is mostly unreliable.]

02007: 154 minutes: dir. David Fincher: written by James Vanderbilt, based on a series of books by Robert Graysmith.