Films
About films or film making.
REN Chrysler in LA
Carolyn and I attended Matthew Barney’s REN shoot at the ephemeral REN Chrysler dealership at the intersection of Rosecrans and Bloomfield in Santa Fe Springs yesterday.
It was a very impressive show, fun to watch and at moments quite exciting, though largely staged for the cameras. The former RV sales lot was converted to an amazingly convincing Chrysler dealership complete with stationary on the walls, sales targets, car dealers and pictures of the employees of the month.
The performance started with the synchronized arrival of sections of a marching band which aggregated in the parking lot. The effect was pretty cool, with timing and distance and location of the different elements spread over a huge distance and slowly coalescing, all lead by marching band leader (and composer) Jonathan Bepler, who I’ve known since grade school but hadn’t seen in person for decades.
An iconic Chrysler Imperial was revealed as a funerary casket, a procession pulled by a few dozen strong men, as Egyptian slaves might have hauled stone blocks, down from the roof of the building and through the parking lot.
The imperial wended its way into a showroom to trade places with a gold firebird and then to its demise at the teeth of a deforestation machine, the showroom fitted with bullet-proof glass and lots of crickets for the purpose. The glass, amazingly, proved strong enough for the flying car parts and crow bars, but was not quite proof against the stabilizer feet of the gigantic excavator. We were perfectly located for that moment.
The remains of the imperial were ritually collected and we joined the staff in the parts department for the final procession involving scarabs, a beautiful woman, and a surprisingly large funerary drape, especially surprising given the orifice from which it was extracted.
The depth of detail of the performance was extraordinary. No simple write up can do it justice and I can’t imagine that even a small part of every carefully prepared element can make it to the final film. The details made walking through the performance an exercise in discovery – from post-it notes in the office, to the illuminated Chrysler signs as tunable Taiko drums, to the dealer tags on the cars in the lot everything was meticulously prepared over four weeks. Then a day later it was gone.
Town Car
Totally randomly Hertz gave me a Lincoln Town Car instead of the Taurus I rented. Why? I do not know, but as I was wearing a long black coat and leather gloves for the weather, everyone assumed I was Carolyn’s driver. The car is really set up for a driver – the back has more room than the front, the door release button locks and unlocks on the back doors and there are no cup holders. And the engine sounds like Bender wheezing in that episode where Farnsworth made him human…
Diary Of The Dead
George Romero’s Diary of the Dead premiered as a sold-out midnight show at TIFF. It doesn’t disappoint, keeping up the gore and fun of the series. The framing context of this particular undead episode is a bunch of film students and making a mummy film in the woods when the dead come walking home. They decide to flee to their family homes as they struggle to come to grips with the reality of the situation, somehow (against demographic) apparently not having seen any of the previous “… of the Dead” movies and not immediately grasping the seriousness of the situation and so making those wonderful horror movie mistakes.
As they go on, one of the gang becomes obsessed with capturing the disaster on film and the story is told from the perspective of his UGC (user generated content). In the end it isn’t clear whether the meta-comment is that UGC is valuable (“mainstream media is lying”) or detrimental (“with so many voices, nobody knows what to believe”).
Either way, it’s a fun movie with plenty of blood and gore.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival
My Enemy’s Enemy
“My Enemy’s Enemy” is a reference to the support given Klaus Barbie by the CIA (at least) following WWII by which the “Butcher of Lyon” evaded capture and avoided prosecution for his war crimes for almost 40 years.
The movie is a powerful testament to Barbie’s life-long commitment to torture and abuse, skills he learned as a Nazi, brutal methods he taught the CIA and various South American governments, successful programs of sadistic torture and abuse some of which (“the submarine” whereby victims are held underwater until they believe they are drowning, now known as “waterboarding”) are still known to be in use by the CIA today.
The movie also makes a case for Barbie’s defense argument, that it is hypocritical to prosecute him only when his utility to, particularly, the US has run out and not before, a long-held policy that continues with Hussein and Noriega and certainly many others.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival
Ne touchez pas la hache
Don’t Touch the Axe is a fairly slow movie of a very stoic general who falls in love with a duchess and ultimately vice versa. The story plays as a costume drama full of meaningful glances and rebuffed advances. Ultimately the mismatched timing, first one being forward while the other is being reticent and vice versa becomes tiresome and by the end it is hard to really care about the ultimate consequences of their monumental, but unsurprising failure to communicate.
Guillaume Depardieu is good as the general, and looks a lot like his father. Jeanne Balibar is very pretty and easy to watch. Both give flawless, if very restrained performances.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival
Chacun son cin?ma
Chacun son cinéma ou Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s’éteint et que le film commence is a series of 33 shorts about movies, each about 2 minutes long, each by a different and significant director. Some are a bit tedious or somewhat incomprehensible, but a few really stand out: a joke about moaning in pain (rather than orgasm) during a screening of Emanuele and another about a man who takes makes the ultimate response to a noisy, self-centered movie patron with an ice pick to the head, a fantasy to which we could all relate after dozens of movies.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival
Izgnanie
The Banishment is the story of mistrust and misunderstanding with disastrous consequences. The movie starts with a dramatic drive by a man (Aleksandr Baluyev as Mark) who appears to be bleeding to death from a bullet in his arm. His brother (Konstantin Lavronenko as Alex) dramatically removes the bullet with highly confident and seemingly practiced field surgery. Why, we have no idea and never learn.
Alex’s wife, Vera (Maria Bonnevie), also has a secret which comes out when Alex and family move out to his father’s house in the country (again, for reasons that are not explained). Ultimately the secret brings disaster and then regrets. It is a sad story of regret and insanity. But very compelling.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival
Obscene
Obscene is the story of Barney Rosset’s efforts to publish Evergreen and works like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and I Am Curious (yellow) in the face of the essentially absurdist repression of the 1950s.
The story is very well told, and extremely interesting. The best moments come from the insights of some of his contemporaries like Jim Carroll and particularly the always charming and insightful Gore Vidal and John Waters (either of whom would be captivating on their own for 90 minutes).
Barney is, in the end and despite his flaws, a hero of contemporary literature and the right of free expression and all the more inspirational that his motivation was at least substantially prurient and all the more touching that he was ultimately successfully attacked by conservative forces. It is a compelling battle cry for the extraordinary social merit of the erotic and perverse.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival
My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg was narrated live (by Guy) in the theater at our screening. It is, at times, howling funny even for a non-winnipegger, though the Toronto audience seemed very amused by some Canadian and Winnipeg specific jokes that I didn’t really get. The live performance added a lot, I thought, to the experience of the movie, the two working together very well to foreshadow and set up some of the jokes.
For a movie entirely about something as personal as Guy’s childhood and as place as specific (and as unlikely to be on most people’s must visit list) as Winnipeg, the movie touched a lot of universal truths while being quirky and colloquial.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival
Mongol
Mongol tells the early life of Ghengis Kahn from choosing his charming bride at 10 to unifying the Mongol people’s in a final, climactic battle.
It is an extremely well produced movie by Sergei Bodrov, entirely up to Hollywood blockbuster standards, though the language is Mongolian (of course, since all the world will someday speak Mongol, the most beautiful language in the world).
Though the film is brutal and violent, it is so in the normal mode of Hollywood films: stylized and sanitized with sprays of computer-animated looking blood marking the (frequent) satisfying deaths of opponents and the tragic deaths of allies alike.
Is is the Gladiator of the Steppe, a strong, compelling film that should appeal broadly, despite subtitles.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival