Last Days's Recent Activity

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Title: Last Days
Year: 2005
Director: Gus Van Sant
Plot: Filmmaker Gus Van Sant wrote and directed this meditation on stardom and its costs, inspired in part by the life and death of rock musician Kurt Cobain. Blake (Michael Pitt) is the leader of an influential alternative rock band who has unexpectedly won a large degree of fame and fortune. Depressed and unsure of what to do with himself or his success, Blake wanders about the run-down mansion he calls home and the visits the woods nearby. While a handful of friends live with Blake, he prefers to avoid them, as they often seem more interested in money or help with their music than in his friendship; meanwhile, Blake is also confronted by a handful of fans, his agent, and a gentleman who sells advertising space in a telephone directory and has no idea who Blake is. As Blake goes through the motions of his day, he tries to decide what he should do next, and what might finally free him from his ennui. Shot and edited in the same languid, low-key manner as his films Elephant and Gerry, Last Days also stars Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green, Ricky Jay, and Harmony Korine. Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth also appears in the film, while her husband and bandmate Thurston Moore was a consultant for the musical score; both were friends of Kurt Cobain and toured in tandem with Nirvana on several occasions. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 19
Number of Lists: 22
Number of blog posts: 3
Number of discussion threads: 1
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:23:35 GMTLast Days2005Gus Van SantFilmmaker <a href="/players/P___115102/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Gus Van Sant</a> wrote and directed this meditation on stardom and its costs, inspired in part by the life and death of rock musician Kurt Cobain. Blake (<a href="/players/P___291783/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Michael Pitt</a>) is the leader of an influential alternative rock band who has unexpectedly won a large degree of fame and fortune. Depressed and unsure of what to do with himself or his success, Blake wanders about the run-down mansion he calls home and the visits the woods nearby. While a handful of friends live with Blake, he prefers to avoid them, as they often seem more interested in money or help with their music than in his friendship; meanwhile, Blake is also confronted by a handful of fans, his agent, and a gentleman who sells advertising space in a telephone directory and has no idea who Blake is. As Blake goes through the motions of his day, he tries to decide what he should do next, and what might finally free him from his ennui. Shot and edited in the same languid, low-key manner as his films <a href=/films/226318/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Elephant</a> and <a href=/films/205646/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Gerry</a>, Last Days also stars <a href="/players/P____29440/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Lukas Haas</a>, <a href="/players/P_____2163/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Asia Argento</a>, Scott Green, <a href="/players/P____35331/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Ricky Jay</a>, and <a href="/players/P___231470/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Harmony Korine</a>. Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth also appears in the film, while her husband and bandmate Thurston Moore was a consultant for the musical score; both were friends of Kurt Cobain and toured in tandem with Nirvana on several occasions. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide19Tag Target (>10)22313http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/t66179iynsk.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Last_Days/261816/default.aspxFilm Spout Post: Cheung Comes Clean http://www.spout.com/blogs/solafekxela/archive/2007/9/1/19228.aspx

Post By: solafekxela
Post To: solafekxela Blog
Post Date: 9/1/2007 2:35:00 PM
Body: Veteran director Olivier Assayas tackles the popular but uncomfortable topic of drugs and music in Clean. Maggie Cheung is a musician suffering through a drug addiction, with the memory of her late husband, Lee, who overdosed, looming over her. Both are musicians who share a son, who is staying with Lee’s parents (Nick Nolte and Martha Henry). The film proceeds to follow Emily’s attempt to change her life, kick her habit, and become a successful musician. Her journey is always compelling, as she gets sidetracked by past loves, the need to reinitiate a relationship with Jay, her son, and, obviously, her drug addiction. Assayas doesn’t waste any time with dull exposition, only establishing Emily’s relationship with Lee and their life that revolves around music. When she leaves Lee alone for the night, a pouring rain in the morning signals not only her isolation, but the cleansing that her husband’s death will allow. Though the moment lacks some emotional gravitas, as more about Lee becomes clear, the impact of his life and death is more believable. The film really gains its steam after an encounter between Emily and Jay’s father, Albrecht, that sets the stage for her transformation. The film loses some focus, but only because this is the track her life takes. She is unable to concentrate on her career as a musician and her son because she has to deal with some events and mistakes from her past. All of these elements are exciting and convincing; Assayas never gives the impression that his film is just an observation. Rather, it is told almost completely from Emily’s point of view. When he does break away for the subplot of Jay, Albrecht, and Rosemary, Lee’s ill mother, the film loses momentum and passion. All the performances are almost pitch-perfect, including, of course, Cheung, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, and Nick Nolte. The supporting players are just as good, if not better, with the annoying exception of James Dennis, who plays the young Jay. Almost every moment with him falls flat because of his undeveloped talent, but the film has so much depth that it doesn’t take much away. Much of the dialogue feels obvious and easy, but, because of these performances, it is not entirely unbelievable. The biggest problem with the film, though, involves Emily’s musical talent. Though her singing voice is rarely heard, Assayas never convinces that she has enough skill to land the deals that she does. Since he ends the film implying that everything is in order regarding her career, it falls a little short and loses touch with reality. It becomes less about her movement to kick her drug addiction and more about her finding a job and supporting herself, so Assayas failed to reveal the potential of her career early on, likely because he has Lee die so early in the film.Clean is certainly not one of the best films ever made about drugs (see: Traffic, Requiem for a Dream, Last Days), but, thankfully, Assayas makes it about more than that. He never gets distracted by the less significant events in Emily’s life, always remindful of her ultimate goal. The performances are what sell the film; without them, it would just lie there with nothing but contrived dialogue and emotionally dead scenes. It becomes a very exciting musical journey. For Emily, though, it isn’t about the music at all; it’s her quest for independence and responsibility for her own life. Cheung plays not a musician, but a normal person who struggles to shake her life’s addictions in order to become more accountable for her actions.
]]>Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:35:00 GMTsolafekxelasolafekxela Blog9/1/2007 2:35:00 PMVeteran director Olivier Assayas tackles the popular but uncomfortable topic of drugs and music in Clean. Maggie Cheung is a musician suffering through a drug addiction, with the memory of her late husband, Lee, who overdosed, looming over her. Both are musicians who share a son, who is staying with Lee’s parents (Nick Nolte and Martha Henry). The film proceeds to follow Emily’s attempt to change her life, kick her habit, and become a successful musician. Her journey is always compelling, as she gets sidetracked by past loves, the need to reinitiate a relationship with Jay, her son, and, obviously, her drug addiction. Assayas doesn’t waste any time with dull exposition, only establishing Emily’s relationship with Lee and their life that revolves around music. When she leaves Lee alone for the night, a pouring rain in the morning signals not only her isolation, but the cleansing that her husband’s death will allow. Though the moment lacks some emotional gravitas, as more about Lee becomes clear, the impact of his life and death is more believable. The film really gains its steam after an encounter between Emily and Jay’s father, Albrecht, that sets the stage for her transformation. The film loses some focus, but only because this is the track her life takes. She is unable to concentrate on her career as a musician and her son because she has to deal with some events and mistakes from her past. All of these elements are exciting and convincing; Assayas never gives the impression that his film is just an observation. Rather, it is told almost completely from Emily’s point of view. When he does break away for the subplot of Jay, Albrecht, and Rosemary, Lee’s ill mother, the film loses momentum and passion. All the performances are almost pitch-perfect, including, of course, Cheung, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, and Nick Nolte. The supporting players are just as good, if not better, with the annoying exception of James Dennis, who plays the young Jay. Almost every moment with him falls flat because of his undeveloped talent, but the film has so much depth that it doesn’t take much away. Much of the dialogue feels obvious and easy, but, because of these performances, it is not entirely unbelievable. The biggest problem with the film, though, involves Emily’s musical talent. Though her singing voice is rarely heard, Assayas never convinces that she has enough skill to land the deals that she does. Since he ends the film implying that everything is in order regarding her career, it falls a little short and loses touch with reality. It becomes less about her movement to kick her drug addiction and more about her finding a job and supporting herself, so Assayas failed to reveal the potential of her career early on, likely because he has Lee die so early in the film.Clean is certainly not one of the best films ever made about drugs (see: Traffic, Requiem for a Dream, Last Days), but, thankfully, Assayas makes it about more than that. He never gets distracted by the less significant events in Emily’s life, always remindful of her ultimate goal. The performances are what sell the film; without them, it would just lie there with nothing but contrived dialogue and emotionally dead scenes. It becomes a very exciting musical journey. For Emily, though, it isn’t about the music at all; it’s her quest for independence and responsibility for her own life. Cheung plays not a musician, but a normal person who struggles to shake her life’s addictions in order to become more accountable for her actions. Spout Post: "Keep your eyes open and your thoughts pure." http://www.spout.com/blogs/bigjefflebowski/archive/2007/7/18/15202.aspx

Post By: BigJeffLebowski
Post To: BigJeffLebowski Blog
Post Date: 7/18/2007 3:26:00 PM
Body: As far as sex symbols go, few are willing to plumb the depths of depravity as fully and as frequently as Asia Argento. This is significant not only in that it opens her to a world of film roles at which other actress would likely scoff, but also because her magnetism infuses even her most deplorable characters with an intrinsic, unquantifiable duende that makes other characters’ attractions to them a little more explicable. No film I’ve seen of hers demonstrates this more definitively than The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, which she also co-wrote and directed from the faux autobiographical works of JT LeRoy. It is important that the film’s -- and the stories’ -- lack of authenticity be addressed in any critical assessment of the work. Argento begins her film with a close-up of what is presumably her personal copy of “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” complete with marginalia and annotations. The audience is immediately aware of the artifice of the film; this is an adaptation, it is playacting. Filmmakers such as Godard, Fellini, and Bergman have used similar framing devices to attune their audiences to the inherent lie of the cinema, that what we see as active, moving documents of life are nothing more than manufactured images flickering in the darkness. This can be used to draw attention to the philosophical or thematic aspects of a film, or simply to give the audience a moment of cathartic release, in which they can let go of their breath, sit back in their seats, and assure themselves, Yes, it was only a movie. In The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, it does give the audience a certain leeway; it tells us it’s okay to watch passively, ineffectually, as countless censurable acts occur before us. It’s one thing that we are given this amnesty within the framework of the cinema, but it is still disconcerting when we realize that Argento made her film before it was publicly announced that JT LeRoy was in fact a literary construction, no more a real person than Huckleberry Finn or Kilgore Trout; and that she may very well have made her film under the pretenses of docudrama rather than fiction. Argento plays Sarah, a 23 year old junkie prostitute who has recently reacquired custody of her son Jeremiah (played by Jimmy Bennett at age 7, and by Dylan and Cole Sprouse several years later). The plot of the film -- which is to say the concurrent theme of its loosely assembled, ragged strands of a story -- follows Sarah and her innumerable misguided abuses of maternal authority. Leaving their home with Jeremiah’s belongings in a garbage bag, Sarah jumps from man to man, home to home, town to town, with Jeremiah in tow, occasionally leaving him in a car or at the home of her most recently jilted lover. While Sarah gallivants about, getting her money from hooking and her food from trash cans, Jeremiah is left with a string of surrogate fathers. Most of them are left incognizant in Sarah’s wake; all of them are abusive. Time and time again, we are given glimmers of hope, only to have them extinguished within seconds: one of Sarah’s countless men shows sympathy for the newly orphaned child, before pathetically raping him; another offers him money for a fresh meal to ammend his mother’s negligence, only to use the diversion to drive off without Jeremiah or Sarah. One wonders why such an inept and unwilling mother would want a child so badly. Sarah is unnervingly blunt when she insists, “I’m your mother, all right? Can’t say I wanted you. Can’t say I didn’t do a rabbit’s tricks to try an’ get rid of you. If my father’d let me, you’d long been flushed down some toilet, you understand?” What is uniquely disconcerting about the scene -- and about Argento’s delivery, especially -- is that Sarah doesn’t say this with remorse; nor does she say it as a warning. Sarah’s deplorable account of Jeremiah’s unwelcome entry to the world is stated plainly, as a fact, as information meant to give Jeremiah some sense of context. But still, Sarah is prone to inexplicable and incongruous moments of tenderness and affection for her son. And just as shadows are darkest in the brightest light, her failings and transgressions as a mother become doubly afflictive when considered alongside her few maternal moments. Jeremiah, seemingly orphaned for good, bounces around for the next several years, in which we learn: Peter Fonda makes a creepy grandfather, Ben Foster makes a creepy cousin, Winona Ryder makes a creepy counselor, and, well, basically everyone within Jeremiah’s sphere is creepy and, in some way, mentally or morally damaged. Every figure of authority leads Jeremiah into temptation, and then punishes him for succumbing to it. It’s a miracle he functions as well as he does; which is not to say he functions well, mind you, but he doesn’t become a catatonic or a suicide, which given the circumstances, is pretty damn impressive. The most unsettling aspect of the film is that Sarah is, astonishingly, the most constant and reliable force in Jeremiah’s life. For all the distant relatives and the truck stop hookups and jilted husbands and fiancés, Sarah is the one person who always comes back to Jeremiah. Is this why he dabbles in transvestitism? Why he attempts to seduce his mother’s boyfriends? I can assume that’s what Argento is driving at, but she is too concerned with the verisimilitude of her characters’ depravity to do more than hint at -- if not accidentally stumble upon -- that kind of psychological depth. What Argento has crafted is a deeply disquieting film about the vulnerability of youth and the fallibility of icons and idols, be they personal, religious, or other. As a visceral, evocative, and purely demonstrative work, it succeeds at its vocation. What Argento has failed to do, however, is offer any kind of redemption for her characters. It’s no accident that Sarah’s final abduction of Jeremiah seems at once liberating and binding; he is so damaged by his upbringing that perpetuating this debauched cycle may well be the only way he can survive in the world. But what message do we take from this? Such are the unjust ways of the world? How blind and senseless we humans are? This kind of vacant morality worked superlatively in a film like Elephant; but as Gus Van Sant demonstrated when he applied the same technique to Last Days, sometimes it reflects nothing more than an empty nihilism on behalf of the characters and their progenitors.
]]>Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:26:00 GMTBigJeffLebowskiBigJeffLebowski Blog7/18/2007 3:26:00 PMAs far as sex symbols go, few are willing to plumb the depths of depravity as fully and as frequently as Asia Argento. This is significant not only in that it opens her to a world of film roles at which other actress would likely scoff, but also because her magnetism infuses even her most deplorable characters with an intrinsic, unquantifiable duende that makes other characters’ attractions to them a little more explicable. No film I’ve seen of hers demonstrates this more definitively than The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, which she also co-wrote and directed from the faux autobiographical works of JT LeRoy. It is important that the film’s -- and the stories’ -- lack of authenticity be addressed in any critical assessment of the work. Argento begins her film with a close-up of what is presumably her personal copy of “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” complete with marginalia and annotations. The audience is immediately aware of the artifice of the film; this is an adaptation, it is playacting. Filmmakers such as Godard, Fellini, and Bergman have used similar framing devices to attune their audiences to the inherent lie of the cinema, that what we see as active, moving documents of life are nothing more than manufactured images flickering in the darkness. This can be used to draw attention to the philosophical or thematic aspects of a film, or simply to give the audience a moment of cathartic release, in which they can let go of their breath, sit back in their seats, and assure themselves, Yes, it was only a movie. In The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, it does give the audience a certain leeway; it tells us it’s okay to watch passively, ineffectually, as countless censurable acts occur before us. It’s one thing that we are given this amnesty within the framework of the cinema, but it is still disconcerting when we realize that Argento made her film before it was publicly announced that JT LeRoy was in fact a literary construction, no more a real person than Huckleberry Finn or Kilgore Trout; and that she may very well have made her film under the pretenses of docudrama rather than fiction. Argento plays Sarah, a 23 year old junkie prostitute who has recently reacquired custody of her son Jeremiah (played by Jimmy Bennett at age 7, and by Dylan and Cole Sprouse several years later). The plot of the film -- which is to say the concurrent theme of its loosely assembled, ragged strands of a story -- follows Sarah and her innumerable misguided abuses of maternal authority. Leaving their home with Jeremiah’s belongings in a garbage bag, Sarah jumps from man to man, home to home, town to town, with Jeremiah in tow, occasionally leaving him in a car or at the home of her most recently jilted lover. While Sarah gallivants about, getting her money from hooking and her food from trash cans, Jeremiah is left with a string of surrogate fathers. Most of them are left incognizant in Sarah’s wake; all of them are abusive. Time and time again, we are given glimmers of hope, only to have them extinguished within seconds: one of Sarah’s countless men shows sympathy for the newly orphaned child, before pathetically raping him; another offers him money for a fresh meal to ammend his mother’s negligence, only to use the diversion to drive off without Jeremiah or Sarah. One wonders why such an inept and unwilling mother would want a child so badly. Sarah is unnervingly blunt when she insists, “I’m your mother, all right? Can’t say I wanted you. Can’t say I didn’t do a rabbit’s tricks to try an’ get rid of you. If my father’d let me, you’d long been flushed down some toilet, you understand?” What is uniquely disconcerting about the scene -- and about Argento’s delivery, especially -- is that Sarah doesn’t say this with remorse; nor does she say it as a warning. Sarah’s deplorable account of Jeremiah’s unwelcome entry to the world is stated plainly, as a fact, as information meant to give Jeremiah some sense of context. But still, Sarah is prone to inexplicable and incongruous moments of tenderness and affection for her son. And just as shadows are darkest in the brightest light, her failings and transgressions as a mother become doubly afflictive when considered alongside her few maternal moments. Jeremiah, seemingly orphaned for good, bounces around for the next several years, in which we learn: Peter Fonda makes a creepy grandfather, Ben Foster makes a creepy cousin, Winona Ryder makes a creepy counselor, and, well, basically everyone within Jeremiah’s sphere is creepy and, in some way, mentally or morally damaged. Every figure of authority leads Jeremiah into temptation, and then punishes him for succumbing to it. It’s a miracle he functions as well as he does; which is not to say he functions well, mind you, but he doesn’t become a catatonic or a suicide, which given the circumstances, is pretty damn impressive. The most unsettling aspect of the film is that Sarah is, astonishingly, the most constant and reliable force in Jeremiah’s life. For all the distant relatives and the truck stop hookups and jilted husbands and fiancés, Sarah is the one person who always comes back to Jeremiah. Is this why he dabbles in transvestitism? Why he attempts to seduce his mother’s boyfriends? I can assume that’s what Argento is driving at, but she is too concerned with the verisimilitude of her characters’ depravity to do more than hint at -- if not accidentally stumble upon -- that kind of psychological depth. What Argento has crafted is a deeply disquieting film about the vulnerability of youth and the fallibility of icons and idols, be they personal, religious, or other. As a visceral, evocative, and purely demonstrative work, it succeeds at its vocation. What Argento has failed to do, however, is offer any kind of redemption for her characters. It’s no accident that Sarah’s final abduction of Jeremiah seems at once liberating and binding; he is so damaged by his upbringing that perpetuating this debauched cycle may well be the only way he can survive in the world. But what message do we take from this? Such are the unjust ways of the world? How blind and senseless we humans are? This kind of vacant morality worked superlatively in a film like Elephant; but as Gus Van Sant demonstrated when he applied the same technique to Last Days, sometimes it reflects nothing more than an empty nihilism on behalf of the characters and their progenitors. Spout Post: Re: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things http://www.spout.com/groups/Spout_Mavens/Re_The_Heart_is_Deceitful_Above_All_Things/366/15201/1/ShowPost.aspx

Post By: BigJeffLebowski
Post To: Spout Mavens
Post Date: 7/18/2007 3:25:56 PM
Body: As far as sex symbols go, few are willing to plumb the depths of depravity as fully and as frequently as Asia Argento. This is significant not only in that it opens her to a world of film roles at which other actress would likely scoff, but also because her magnetism infuses even her most deplorable characters with an intrinsic, unquantifiable duende that makes other characters’ attractions to them a little more explicable. No film I’ve seen of hers demonstrates this more definitively than The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, which she also co-wrote and directed from the faux autobiographical works of JT LeRoy. It is important that the film’s -- and the stories’ -- lack of authenticity be addressed in any critical assessment of the work. Argento begins her film with a close-up of what is presumably her personal copy of “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” complete with marginalia and annotations. The audience is immediately aware of the artifice of the film; this is an adaptation, it is playacting. Filmmakers such as Godard, Fellini, and Bergman have used similar framing devices to attune their audiences to the inherent lie of the cinema, that what we see as active, moving documents of life are nothing more than manufactured images flickering in the darkness. This can be used to draw attention to the philosophical or thematic aspects of a film, or simply to give the audience a moment of cathartic release, in which they can let go of their breath, sit back in their seats, and assure themselves, Yes, it was only a movie. In The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, it does give the audience a certain leeway; it tells us it’s okay to watch passively, ineffectually, as countless censurable acts occur before us. It’s one thing that we are given this amnesty within the framework of the cinema, but it is still disconcerting when we realize that Argento made her film before it was publicly announced that JT LeRoy was in fact a literary construction, no more a real person than Huckleberry Finn or Kilgore Trout; and that she may very well have made her film under the pretenses of docudrama rather than fiction. Argento plays Sarah, a 23 year old junkie prostitute who has recently reacquired custody of her son Jeremiah (played by Jimmy Bennett at age 7, and by Dylan and Cole Sprouse several years later). The plot of the film -- which is to say the concurrent theme of its loosely assembled, ragged strands of a story -- follows Sarah and her innumerable misguided abuses of maternal authority. Leaving their home with Jeremiah’s belongings in a garbage bag, Sarah jumps from man to man, home to home, town to town, with Jeremiah in tow, occasionally leaving him in a car or at the home of her most recently jilted lover. While Sarah gallivants about, getting her money from hooking and her food from trash cans, Jeremiah is left with a string of surrogate fathers. Most of them are left incognizant in Sarah’s wake; all of them are abusive. Time and time again, we are given glimmers of hope, only to have them extinguished within seconds: one of Sarah’s countless men shows sympathy for the newly orphaned child, before pathetically raping him; another offers him money for a fresh meal in light of his mother’s negligence, only to use the diversion to drive off without Jeremiah or Sarah. One wonders why such an inept and unwilling mother would want a child so badly. Sarah is unnervingly blunt when she insists, “I’m your mother, all right? Can’t say I wanted you. Can’t say I didn’t do a rabbit’s tricks to try an’ get rid of you. If my father’d let me, you’d long been flushed down some toilet, you understand?” What is uniquely disconcerting about the scene -- and about Argento’s delivery, especially -- is that Sarah doesn’t say this with remorse; nor does she say it as a warning. Sarah’s deplorable account of Jeremiah’s unwelcome entry to the world is stated plainly, as a fact, as information meant to give Jeremiah some sense of context. But still, Sarah is prone to inexplicable and incongruous moments of tenderness and affection for her son. And just as shadows are darkest in the brightest light, her failings and transgressions as a mother become doubly afflictive when considered alongside her few maternal moments. Jeremiah, seemingly orphaned for good, bounces around for the next several years, in which we learn: Peter Fonda makes a creepy grandfather, Ben Foster makes a creepy cousin, Winona Ryder makes a creepy counselor, and, well, basically everyone within Jeremiah’s sphere is creepy and, in some way, mentally or morally damaged. Every figure of authority leads Jeremiah into temptation, and then punishes him for succumbing to it. It’s a miracle he functions as well as he does; which is not to say he functions well, mind you, but he doesn’t become a catatonic or a suicide, which given the circumstances, is pretty damn impressive. The most unsettling aspect of the film is that Sarah is, astonishingly, the most constant and reliable force in Jeremiah’s life. For all the distant relatives and the truck stop hookups and jilted husbands and fiancés, Sarah is the one person who always comes back to Jeremiah. Is this why he dabbles in transvestitism? Why he attempts to seduce his mother’s boyfriends? I can assume that’s what Argento is driving at, but she is too concerned with the verisimilitude of her characters’ depravity to do more than hint at -- if not accidentally stumble upon -- that kind of psychological depth. What Argento has crafted is a deeply disquieting film about the vulnerability of youth and the fallibility of icons and idols, be they personal, religious, or other. As a visceral, evocative, and purely demonstrative work, it succeeds at its vocation. What Argento has failed to do, however, is offer any kind of redemption for her characters. It’s no accident that Sarah’s final abduction of Jeremiah seems at once liberating and binding; he is so damaged by his upbringing that perpetuating this debauched cycle may well be the only way he can survive in the world. But what message do we take from this? Such are the unjust ways of the world? How blind and senseless we humans are? This kind of vacant morality worked superlatively in a film like Elephant; but as Gus Van Sant demonstrated when he applied the same technique to Last Days, sometimes it reflects nothing more than an empty nihilism on behalf of the characters and their progenitors.
]]>Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:25:56 GMTBigJeffLebowskiSpout Mavens7/18/2007 3:25:56 PMAs far as sex symbols go, few are willing to plumb the depths of depravity as fully and as frequently as Asia Argento. This is significant not only in that it opens her to a world of film roles at which other actress would likely scoff, but also because her magnetism infuses even her most deplorable characters with an intrinsic, unquantifiable duende that makes other characters’ attractions to them a little more explicable. No film I’ve seen of hers demonstrates this more definitively than The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, which she also co-wrote and directed from the faux autobiographical works of JT LeRoy. It is important that the film’s -- and the stories’ -- lack of authenticity be addressed in any critical assessment of the work. Argento begins her film with a close-up of what is presumably her personal copy of “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” complete with marginalia and annotations. The audience is immediately aware of the artifice of the film; this is an adaptation, it is playacting. Filmmakers such as Godard, Fellini, and Bergman have used similar framing devices to attune their audiences to the inherent lie of the cinema, that what we see as active, moving documents of life are nothing more than manufactured images flickering in the darkness. This can be used to draw attention to the philosophical or thematic aspects of a film, or simply to give the audience a moment of cathartic release, in which they can let go of their breath, sit back in their seats, and assure themselves, Yes, it was only a movie. In The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, it does give the audience a certain leeway; it tells us it’s okay to watch passively, ineffectually, as countless censurable acts occur before us. It’s one thing that we are given this amnesty within the framework of the cinema, but it is still disconcerting when we realize that Argento made her film before it was publicly announced that JT LeRoy was in fact a literary construction, no more a real person than Huckleberry Finn or Kilgore Trout; and that she may very well have made her film under the pretenses of docudrama rather than fiction. Argento plays Sarah, a 23 year old junkie prostitute who has recently reacquired custody of her son Jeremiah (played by Jimmy Bennett at age 7, and by Dylan and Cole Sprouse several years later). The plot of the film -- which is to say the concurrent theme of its loosely assembled, ragged strands of a story -- follows Sarah and her innumerable misguided abuses of maternal authority. Leaving their home with Jeremiah’s belongings in a garbage bag, Sarah jumps from man to man, home to home, town to town, with Jeremiah in tow, occasionally leaving him in a car or at the home of her most recently jilted lover. While Sarah gallivants about, getting her money from hooking and her food from trash cans, Jeremiah is left with a string of surrogate fathers. Most of them are left incognizant in Sarah’s wake; all of them are abusive. Time and time again, we are given glimmers of hope, only to have them extinguished within seconds: one of Sarah’s countless men shows sympathy for the newly orphaned child, before pathetically raping him; another offers him money for a fresh meal in light of his mother’s negligence, only to use the diversion to drive off without Jeremiah or Sarah. One wonders why such an inept and unwilling mother would want a child so badly. Sarah is unnervingly blunt when she insists, “I’m your mother, all right? Can’t say I wanted you. Can’t say I didn’t do a rabbit’s tricks to try an’ get rid of you. If my father’d let me, you’d long been flushed down some toilet, you understand?” What is uniquely disconcerting about the scene -- and about Argento’s delivery, especially -- is that Sarah doesn’t say this with remorse; nor does she say it as a warning. Sarah’s deplorable account of Jeremiah’s unwelcome entry to the world is stated plainly, as a fact, as information meant to give Jeremiah some sense of context. But still, Sarah is prone to inexplicable and incongruous moments of tenderness and affection for her son. And just as shadows are darkest in the brightest light, her failings and transgressions as a mother become doubly afflictive when considered alongside her few maternal moments. Jeremiah, seemingly orphaned for good, bounces around for the next several years, in which we learn: Peter Fonda makes a creepy grandfather, Ben Foster makes a creepy cousin, Winona Ryder makes a creepy counselor, and, well, basically everyone within Jeremiah’s sphere is creepy and, in some way, mentally or morally damaged. Every figure of authority leads Jeremiah into temptation, and then punishes him for succumbing to it. It’s a miracle he functions as well as he does; which is not to say he functions well, mind you, but he doesn’t become a catatonic or a suicide, which given the circumstances, is pretty damn impressive. The most unsettling aspect of the film is that Sarah is, astonishingly, the most constant and reliable force in Jeremiah’s life. For all the distant relatives and the truck stop hookups and jilted husbands and fiancés, Sarah is the one person who always comes back to Jeremiah. Is this why he dabbles in transvestitism? Why he attempts to seduce his mother’s boyfriends? I can assume that’s what Argento is driving at, but she is too concerned with the verisimilitude of her characters’ depravity to do more than hint at -- if not accidentally stumble upon -- that kind of psychological depth. What Argento has crafted is a deeply disquieting film about the vulnerability of youth and the fallibility of icons and idols, be they personal, religious, or other. As a visceral, evocative, and purely demonstrative work, it succeeds at its vocation. What Argento has failed to do, however, is offer any kind of redemption for her characters. It’s no accident that Sarah’s final abduction of Jeremiah seems at once liberating and binding; he is so damaged by his upbringing that perpetuating this debauched cycle may well be the only way he can survive in the world. But what message do we take from this? Such are the unjust ways of the world? How blind and senseless we humans are? This kind of vacant morality worked superlatively in a film like Elephant; but as Gus Van Sant demonstrated when he applied the same technique to Last Days, sometimes it reflects nothing more than an empty nihilism on behalf of the characters and their progenitors. Spout Post: Clip of The Day: Jem Cohen + Patti Smith = Nirvana http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2007/6/21/11589.aspx

Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 6/21/2007 2:01:08 PM
Body: Jem Cohen won the "Someone to Watch" Independent Spirit Award for his feature film Chain last year, but many of us have been "watching" his collaborations with bands like Fugazi for quite awhile. Cohen's work usually falls somewhere in the cracks between personal documentary and experimental narrative. Often shot handheld on low-gauge film, they're like punk-rock home movies, always intimate (even when set largely in cold/industrial spaces, as with Chain), but never cloying sentimental. Cohen's latest work is the above music video, for Patti Smith's banjo-fied cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (direct link here, via Rex at Fimoculous). The clip oozes Cohen's signature style, insofar as it's a grainy, black-and-white portrait of a space and in its inhabitants. But with a bedraggled, be-flanneled Smith at its center, it could also be placed in the same micro-genre as Gus Van Sant's Last Days -- both seem to be muted elegies to a kind of myth of artistic insularity represented by Kurt Cobain. More Jem Cohen: Senses of Cinema interview by Rhys Graham Chuck Tryon on Cohen's recent documentary work indieWIRE story on the art installation that led to Chain Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:01:08 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com6/21/2007 2:01:08 PM Jem Cohen won the "Someone to Watch" Independent Spirit Award for his feature film Chain last year, but many of us have been "watching" his collaborations with bands like Fugazi for quite awhile. Cohen's work usually falls somewhere in the cracks between personal documentary and experimental narrative. Often shot handheld on low-gauge film, they're like punk-rock home movies, always intimate (even when set largely in cold/industrial spaces, as with Chain), but never cloying sentimental. Cohen's latest work is the above music video, for Patti Smith's banjo-fied cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (direct link here, via Rex at Fimoculous). The clip oozes Cohen's signature style, insofar as it's a grainy, black-and-white portrait of a space and in its inhabitants. But with a bedraggled, be-flanneled Smith at its center, it could also be placed in the same micro-genre as Gus Van Sant's Last Days -- both seem to be muted elegies to a kind of myth of artistic insularity represented by Kurt Cobain. More Jem Cohen: Senses of Cinema interview by Rhys Graham Chuck Tryon on Cohen's recent documentary work indieWIRE story on the art installation that led to Chain Originally posted on:SpoutBlog Spout Tag:Loved-It http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/Loved-It/MemberTagFilms.aspxLoved-It
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]]>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:31:33 GMT9971530Tag Spout Tag:drugaddiction http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/drugaddiction/MemberTagFilms.aspxdrugaddiction
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]]>Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:13:22 GMT26167Tag Spout Tag:band-music-group http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/band-music-group/MemberTagFilms.aspxband-music-group
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