list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around LOL on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/LOL/278816/default.aspx Title: LOL
Year: 2007
Director: Joe Swanberg
Plot: The constant need to be plugged-in and connected threatens to crash the real life operating system of three technologically obsessed twenty-somethings in director Joe Swanberg's humorous meditation on the relationship between man and machine in modern society. Tim does computer work for a living, but he also lives for his computer. Unfortunately his inability to snap the lid closed on his laptop is rapidly alienating his girlfriend Ada, who recognizes Tim's apparent inability to communicate with other people without the buffer of technology. Meanwhile, as struggling musician Alex obsesses over a girl he met on an adult website, flesh-and-blood girl named Walter does her best to make her attraction to Alex known. Lastly, Chris has transferred from New York to Chicago due to the demands of his job, making a long distance relationship with his east coast girlfriend Greta increasingly difficult to maintain. Though the pair talks constantly on their cell-phones while also sending cell-phone pictures to one and other, neither Chris nor Greta can deny that their reliance on technology in sustaining their relationship is no substitute for the living, breathing warmth of human companionship. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 11
Number of Lists: 6
Number of blog posts: 16
Number of discussion threads: 5
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:54:00 GMTLOL2007Joe SwanbergThe constant need to be plugged-in and connected threatens to crash the real life operating system of three technologically obsessed twenty-somethings in director Joe Swanberg's humorous meditation on the relationship between man and machine in modern society. Tim does computer work for a living, but he also lives for his computer. Unfortunately his inability to snap the lid closed on his laptop is rapidly alienating his girlfriend Ada, who recognizes Tim's apparent inability to communicate with other people without the buffer of technology. Meanwhile, as struggling musician Alex obsesses over a girl he met on an adult website, flesh-and-blood girl named Walter does her best to make her attraction to Alex known. Lastly, Chris has transferred from New York to Chicago due to the demands of his job, making a long distance relationship with his east coast girlfriend Greta increasingly difficult to maintain. Though the pair talks constantly on their cell-phones while also sending cell-phone pictures to one and other, neither Chris nor Greta can deny that their reliance on technology in sustaining their relationship is no substitute for the living, breathing warmth of human companionship. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide11Tag Target (>10)61653http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s278816.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/LOL/278816/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2008/11/19/37428.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 11/19/2008 1:54:00 AM
Body: First paragraph of a review that I posted last year:"If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore."My assigned movie, "Funny Ha Ha," would be perhaps the first film in the mumblecore genre. Did I read something somewhere about how frequently, for some mysterious reason, the first in a genre is also the best? Homer, Milton, and Cervantes were mentioned. Could this be true of FHH? Is it the purest, as well as the first, mumblecore expression of newly-adult American modern life on the hoof, before the mumblecore melodrama of Mutual Appreciation or the variations on a theme in "LOL" or the psychological depth of The Puffy Chair? A question to keep in mind as I watch.Haven't heard much from the mumblecore community lately. What's the buzz? What's the buzz around saying what's the buzz? Stephen Holden called Baghead a mumblecore movie - comedy/horror mumblecore? Are movies like In Search of a Midnight Kiss moving mumblecore into some new merged genre? Was Old Joy really mumblecore, as it's often listed; some genre morphing might have already taken place in that one. Andrew Bujalski, who wrote, directed, and starred in FHH, hasn't made a feature film in years; he's done some acting but not made any movies. Kate Dollenmayer, who plays Marnie, the lead in FHH, appeared in Bujalski's next film and then disappeared behind the camera. There's an album with her name on it; otherwise, she's light on the google.FHH caught me in one of my watching-the-last-half-of-the-movie-first phases. I've recently finished Rules of the Game and War, Inc. that way. Watching those two films backwards helped them, in my estimation. I'm guessing in advance that watching "Funny Ha Ha," starting at the 45-minute mark, will not harm my enjoyment of the film and may help it. But we'll see.Fooey! Now I've slipped up and taken a peek at the first few paragraphs of A.O. Scott's FHH review in the NYT, wherein he tells us that the film is about a young woman's fruitless search for a little love and meaning in her life. Why did I read that? So now why should I bother dropping into the middle of the movie, already knowing that? The adventure and mystery are ruined. Feh. But I'll do it anyway. So. There Marnie is, passed out in a car. Now she stays with a girlfriend and her girlfriend goes on a job interview. Oops, Marnie is the girlfriend, not the drunk in the car. Confusion. Good. That's how I like it to be. No harm done reading a little A.O. Scott. Meanwhile, the theme of the movie is made clear in minutes, middle start or not, once I've got Marnie in my sights. Perhaps my initial excitement was a little attenuated, but now I'm involved, so onward!Marnie is wearing a T-shirt from a Newton grammar school. Newton is an upscale community in the Boston suburbs. Always made me think of fig newtons, not Isaac. I seem to remember a mall there, back in the 60s, out on Commonwealth Avenue. Bujalski was born in Boston. A good place to locate a movie about the just-graduated and I speak as one who swam in that social sea after college for a couple of years. Youth, out of school at last. FHH is the pure unvarnished article. The essence of mumblecore. Absolute minimum script, or so it appears onscreen. The meta experience identical to the dramatic experience; that is, there are two layers working here, carrying the same message: (a) level one, the young woman moving along through her first adult life structure while (b) level two, the actors live their lives for us by acting onscreen, so that, for this viewer at least, the element in FHH most profoundly moving is the sight of these twentysomethings struggling with their craft, new adult members of society, now with the responsibility of paying rent and negotiating car insurance (no small task in Massachusetts!), with the need to discover meaning in the challenges that they face and in their responses to those challenges. Not the characters, you understand, but the actors themselves. A reviewer comments "The semi-improvised performances seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters," but the point is that these performances highlight the actors not as the characters they portray but as individuals working - that is, acting. Or am I just being fooled into thinking that I'm seeing the actors, not the characters, because of Bujalski's style? But no. I know nothing about the actors; perhaps they have something in common with their characters, perhaps not. There is a signature cadence in untrained improvisation, with its small pauses not heard in everyday conversation, neither conversation between those who know each other nor that between strangers, tiny pauses born of the actor's interior monolog, pauses which replace the verbal overlaps and gaps found in everyday talk. So that as we watch, the actors think about their lines, or the direction just provided offscreen, or the act of acting, anything but the less conscious social drivers propelling the rest of us day-to-day in casual conversation. Each actor steps into the frame with an ineffable sense of innocence, usually with an embarrassed grin, and speaks, and we understand that here onscreen are living reminders of already-came-of-age, struggling with dialog as an instantiated metaphor for the whole all-of-it struggle involved in becoming an adult. I find this evocative in the extreme, a spiritual supermagnet pulling me back to that same time in my own life, with all the memories, nostalgia, speculations, and regrets attendant to it - a time in my own life when I'm more than ripe for that to happen. Could I, would I, do better a second time around? That question forms the emotional core of the movie for my demographic; the same thing happens when we watch our own children in their twenties. Where else can you get that in cinema? Not in The Incredible Hulk, that's for sure.The Boojer, by the way, saves the juiciest scenes in the movie for himself - an excruciating dinner and a later sort-of-extended-date with Marni. Cultural extra credit: compare and contrast the boy/girl dinners in FHH and I Think I Love My Wife.At the end of the second half, I return to reviewland and find:A.O. Scott: "What gives this film its quiet pathos is not so much the relative bleakness of Marnie's circumstances but the modesty of her expectations. At one point, she makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition - spend more time outdoors, make friends with Jackie, learn to play chess - is both funny and sad."Carina Chocano: "Mainly, Marnie is staying afloat and trying to connect with others who are equally lost."Seems like I've seen a lot of this kind of hangdog vibe around the FHH reviews - negatives about mood and lifestyle - and I am not down with that (although I otherwise agree with the NYT and LA Times FHH review content). Perhaps having reached the top of the mountain makes it hard for Scott and Chocano to see those younger who are still way back down in the foothills. Marnie and her friends in FHH are newly-minted adults living life in that broad, spacious, undefined socioeconomicsphere found in first-world countries, a landscape where middle-class children find themselves free to roam, after emerging from college, if they happen to be situated in the middle of the startingout spectrum: neither at one end on the turf of the cinematically-ever-popular male slackers so often seen onscreen, nor the other end on that of the striving medical-school, law-school, and computer-geek proto-professionals; that is, Marnie and her friends are living the unfocused life that many of us lived in our twenties. I speak as one who stumbled off the college campus for the last time to find myself, at the age of 23, living alone in Boston, working at a job I wasn't interested in, and looking for love after refusing to commit to marriage and being dropped by my intended, who switched to her Plan B awfully quickly, it seemed to me. The quiet pathos for my demographic didn't happen then, it's happening to us now, in our dotage, on the viewer's side of the screen. Where is the pathos in Marnie's freshness and energy and in the potential of youth, for Marnie and her friends with an open and unknowable and limitless future stretching ahead of them, or in the knowledge that Kate Dollenmayer herself has moved on into that future, or in Bujalski's vision? Marnie's to-do list in no way lacks ambition; is in no way funny or sad. The act of making that list metaphorizes the ambition of the young; the contents of the list highlight the innocence of youth; it's a list drawn up by someone with all the time in the world and, interestingly, it is a list quite similar to such a one as made up by someone at the other end of life, without much time remaining.So I asked my daughter about this quiet-pathos thing, her being 23 and a recent graduate and living in Boston, all the same as Marnie; her reply: "As far as waitressing goes, I feel embarrassed about it at times, but I've actually made some valuable connections and now have places to stay and help finding employment if I want to go to South Carolina, Maui, Australia, or Columbia (have business cards/notes/emails from all of these people). Plus I make ok money, work with nice people, take home free food (ok, thats not completely kosher but its not like I get a salary or even hourly pay that amounts to anything after taxes). Plus, Im learning to speak Haitian Creole while simultaneously turning enemies into friends (the cooks didnt like me at first bc they assumed I was racist and told me so, but when I asked to learn their language they are suddenly happy to see me each day). So from my lowly job Im gaining: communication skills, agility training, extreme multi-tasking experience, networking opportunities, and employee benefits (that's the free food). Sounds almost ambitious when phrased correctly. This isnt to say I dont doubt what Im doing because I do, every day, multiple times a day. I get asked time and again by my bosses, co-workers and customers "why are you here if you have a degree from an Ivy League school??" One person even went so far as to say I was being selfish because letting my parents spend all that money to send me to a good school only to "disregard" my qualifications by working in a chain restaurant was just like throwing all that tuition money in the trash. Obviously obtaining "street smarts" and trying to experience different ways of life before choosing the "purpose-driven" one is something only misfits and failures do... So what am I trying to say here? Maybe im just trying to rationalize my own current existence when in reality it is just as ambitionless and lost as Marnie's. But maybe if the reviewers got off their NY Times and La Times high horses and really thought about what it means to EXPERIENCE and LIVE life, they might see things a wee bit differently. Or maybe not. Am I giggly all the time? as my friend Lynnea would say: "HELLS no!" But I dont think Ill look back on this period of my life and see it as a time of just "staying afloat" (my high school years on the other hand...)."One more take on the pathos meme, quickly, before getting on with the movie: Marnie celebrates her birthday quietly. Proactive note to lugubrious reviewers: this also is not pathos. What the heck did I do on my birthdays back in Boston? Who knows? I do remember being in a laundromat at North Station on Christmas Eve one year. It was snowing. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were in town, so The Garden was deserted except for me and an old woman. I went back to my room and drank. I still remember that, so I guess it means something to me, but I didn't feel pathetic at the time. I felt lonely but pretty good.Ginormous. I've had that word in my head. I'm thinking that if I write it down here, maybe it will go away.And so on to the first half of FHH.Oh my God. Bujalski saddles Marnie with an unrequited-love jones, up front. Booge, how could you? What were you thinking? This is something a novice twenty-something filmmaker would do. Oh, right. But this is why watching War, Inc. backwards helped the movie so much; the process cut out loads of unnecessary plot points till it was too late to matter. In the same way, I was able to watch the downslope of FHH without these moulting feathers of love annoying me. Hmm. Now Marnie liplocks some dude at the twenty-eight minute mark. I would never have predicted that. Oh, no, and then she osculates again three minutes later with her married-dude friend. I'm so glad I'm coming to this at the end and not at the beginning. Why? Because in the second half she's staring into the future without seeing beyond the walls of her room, locked in her head while her anger percolates unfelt somewhere down there lower in her body - after the drinking and smooching fail her - but I understood that, in the second half of the movie, without the presumptive romance-o-motivation of the first.No. I'm overreacting. Belay that last paragraph. I've been Hollywoodpavlovianized. This is not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the last minute of Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail. This is random lowkey young adult semijoyless evolutionary smootching, pebbles in a pond that cause no ripples. Marnie pretends that it didn't happen, isn't happening, and I'll do the same. Romance is a big deal for these kids, perhaps the biggest deal. My twenties were mostly a history of bad dates. Easy to put off career issues to the next decade while getting the living part right. So Booge perforce makes use of that, but not so much that we can't shrug when the lips meet, and then move on. But still, this series of fraught encounters with men, I don't know; quit beating the drum, Booge. This does remind me, though, that I watched the original Forsythe Saga backward. As with Marnie and Alex in the second half of FHH, something heavy had obviously gone on between Irene and Soames, and Fleur's life was constantly perturbed by it, but it seemed more romantic to me to not know what that something was, not to know what had happened - seemed more romantic than watching the first half and seeing whatever it was that happened actually happen. Thesis: nostalgia coupled with imagination is always stronger than dramatic invention, probably because lived experience, including the actual act of imagination, is more visceral than skoptophilia and its milder brethren.New-Age side note: Coincidence #1: Earlier in this screed I wrote a sentence using the word "evolutionary" and then I started FHH up again and watched the last ten minutes of the movie, which I hadn't seen yet (minutes 35 to 45) and Marnie says to Alex or Alex says to Marnie, "You're the most evolved person I know." Coincidence #2: Later that day, I went to Blockbuster to return Get Smart (I'm rating it "j" on a scale of 1 to q) and while there I picked up The Last Request, which somebody somewhere liked a little bit, and while I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I liked Get Smart and I said, Anne Hathaway is no Barbara Feldon, and when I got home and started The Last Request, there Barbara was, in a starring role. The odds of plucking up a Barbara Feldon movie at random? Antiginormous. Coincidence #3: Marnie's shirt has the number 18 on its back. I'm 18b. My daughter, I learned THE SAME DAY, is living in apartment #18 in her building on Concord St. Consult your Jung! These coincidental whorls in the universal fabric happened ON THE SAME DAY as Obama's election and mean that FHH is connected to the core zeitgeist of the planet. You read it here first.Propositions: (1) The first half of a movie is usually better than the second half when the movie is watched in normal order. (2) Watching the second half of a movie first often improves the movie. Sometimes, watching the second half is sufficient in itself. (3) Thus, perhaps whichever half you watch first is the best.I had to ask Wilson, who assigned this movie to me, what the last two spoken lines of the last scene were. They seemed crucial in defining the mood of the movie, but mumblecore being named mumblecore for a reason, I couldn't make out what Alex and Marnie said to each other. Fortunately, Wilson could. And those two lines bear out my contention, or so I think, that Bujalski is a deeply optimistic guy and FHH is, in the end, a celebration, not a paean. In that final scene, Marnie shows some anger, a desire to move out into the world, and a rejection of the feckless Alex. Good for her and good for a society and economy (knock on wood) where youth is able to rattle around a little. I watched a mumblecore movie made by Joe Swanberg a while back, in which the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless; Bujalski throws down some marbles in Marnie's path, but his affection for her never lets her fall hard enough to break anything.This film that launched a genre reminds us that being young and being old are two entirely different things. (Bujalski turned 30 this year.)
]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:54:00 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog11/19/2008 1:54:00 AMFirst paragraph of a review that I posted last year:"If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore."My assigned movie, "Funny Ha Ha," would be perhaps the first film in the mumblecore genre. Did I read something somewhere about how frequently, for some mysterious reason, the first in a genre is also the best? Homer, Milton, and Cervantes were mentioned. Could this be true of FHH? Is it the purest, as well as the first, mumblecore expression of newly-adult American modern life on the hoof, before the mumblecore melodrama of Mutual Appreciation or the variations on a theme in "LOL" or the psychological depth of The Puffy Chair? A question to keep in mind as I watch.Haven't heard much from the mumblecore community lately. What's the buzz? What's the buzz around saying what's the buzz? Stephen Holden called Baghead a mumblecore movie - comedy/horror mumblecore? Are movies like In Search of a Midnight Kiss moving mumblecore into some new merged genre? Was Old Joy really mumblecore, as it's often listed; some genre morphing might have already taken place in that one. Andrew Bujalski, who wrote, directed, and starred in FHH, hasn't made a feature film in years; he's done some acting but not made any movies. Kate Dollenmayer, who plays Marnie, the lead in FHH, appeared in Bujalski's next film and then disappeared behind the camera. There's an album with her name on it; otherwise, she's light on the google.FHH caught me in one of my watching-the-last-half-of-the-movie-first phases. I've recently finished Rules of the Game and War, Inc. that way. Watching those two films backwards helped them, in my estimation. I'm guessing in advance that watching "Funny Ha Ha," starting at the 45-minute mark, will not harm my enjoyment of the film and may help it. But we'll see.Fooey! Now I've slipped up and taken a peek at the first few paragraphs of A.O. Scott's FHH review in the NYT, wherein he tells us that the film is about a young woman's fruitless search for a little love and meaning in her life. Why did I read that? So now why should I bother dropping into the middle of the movie, already knowing that? The adventure and mystery are ruined. Feh. But I'll do it anyway. So. There Marnie is, passed out in a car. Now she stays with a girlfriend and her girlfriend goes on a job interview. Oops, Marnie is the girlfriend, not the drunk in the car. Confusion. Good. That's how I like it to be. No harm done reading a little A.O. Scott. Meanwhile, the theme of the movie is made clear in minutes, middle start or not, once I've got Marnie in my sights. Perhaps my initial excitement was a little attenuated, but now I'm involved, so onward!Marnie is wearing a T-shirt from a Newton grammar school. Newton is an upscale community in the Boston suburbs. Always made me think of fig newtons, not Isaac. I seem to remember a mall there, back in the 60s, out on Commonwealth Avenue. Bujalski was born in Boston. A good place to locate a movie about the just-graduated and I speak as one who swam in that social sea after college for a couple of years. Youth, out of school at last. FHH is the pure unvarnished article. The essence of mumblecore. Absolute minimum script, or so it appears onscreen. The meta experience identical to the dramatic experience; that is, there are two layers working here, carrying the same message: (a) level one, the young woman moving along through her first adult life structure while (b) level two, the actors live their lives for us by acting onscreen, so that, for this viewer at least, the element in FHH most profoundly moving is the sight of these twentysomethings struggling with their craft, new adult members of society, now with the responsibility of paying rent and negotiating car insurance (no small task in Massachusetts!), with the need to discover meaning in the challenges that they face and in their responses to those challenges. Not the characters, you understand, but the actors themselves. A reviewer comments "The semi-improvised performances seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters," but the point is that these performances highlight the actors not as the characters they portray but as individuals working - that is, acting. Or am I just being fooled into thinking that I'm seeing the actors, not the characters, because of Bujalski's style? But no. I know nothing about the actors; perhaps they have something in common with their characters, perhaps not. There is a signature cadence in untrained improvisation, with its small pauses not heard in everyday conversation, neither conversation between those who know each other nor that between strangers, tiny pauses born of the actor's interior monolog, pauses which replace the verbal overlaps and gaps found in everyday talk. So that as we watch, the actors think about their lines, or the direction just provided offscreen, or the act of acting, anything but the less conscious social drivers propelling the rest of us day-to-day in casual conversation. Each actor steps into the frame with an ineffable sense of innocence, usually with an embarrassed grin, and speaks, and we understand that here onscreen are living reminders of already-came-of-age, struggling with dialog as an instantiated metaphor for the whole all-of-it struggle involved in becoming an adult. I find this evocative in the extreme, a spiritual supermagnet pulling me back to that same time in my own life, with all the memories, nostalgia, speculations, and regrets attendant to it - a time in my own life when I'm more than ripe for that to happen. Could I, would I, do better a second time around? That question forms the emotional core of the movie for my demographic; the same thing happens when we watch our own children in their twenties. Where else can you get that in cinema? Not in The Incredible Hulk, that's for sure.The Boojer, by the way, saves the juiciest scenes in the movie for himself - an excruciating dinner and a later sort-of-extended-date with Marni. Cultural extra credit: compare and contrast the boy/girl dinners in FHH and I Think I Love My Wife.At the end of the second half, I return to reviewland and find:A.O. Scott: "What gives this film its quiet pathos is not so much the relative bleakness of Marnie's circumstances but the modesty of her expectations. At one point, she makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition - spend more time outdoors, make friends with Jackie, learn to play chess - is both funny and sad."Carina Chocano: "Mainly, Marnie is staying afloat and trying to connect with others who are equally lost."Seems like I've seen a lot of this kind of hangdog vibe around the FHH reviews - negatives about mood and lifestyle - and I am not down with that (although I otherwise agree with the NYT and LA Times FHH review content). Perhaps having reached the top of the mountain makes it hard for Scott and Chocano to see those younger who are still way back down in the foothills. Marnie and her friends in FHH are newly-minted adults living life in that broad, spacious, undefined socioeconomicsphere found in first-world countries, a landscape where middle-class children find themselves free to roam, after emerging from college, if they happen to be situated in the middle of the startingout spectrum: neither at one end on the turf of the cinematically-ever-popular male slackers so often seen onscreen, nor the other end on that of the striving medical-school, law-school, and computer-geek proto-professionals; that is, Marnie and her friends are living the unfocused life that many of us lived in our twenties. I speak as one who stumbled off the college campus for the last time to find myself, at the age of 23, living alone in Boston, working at a job I wasn't interested in, and looking for love after refusing to commit to marriage and being dropped by my intended, who switched to her Plan B awfully quickly, it seemed to me. The quiet pathos for my demographic didn't happen then, it's happening to us now, in our dotage, on the viewer's side of the screen. Where is the pathos in Marnie's freshness and energy and in the potential of youth, for Marnie and her friends with an open and unknowable and limitless future stretching ahead of them, or in the knowledge that Kate Dollenmayer herself has moved on into that future, or in Bujalski's vision? Marnie's to-do list in no way lacks ambition; is in no way funny or sad. The act of making that list metaphorizes the ambition of the young; the contents of the list highlight the innocence of youth; it's a list drawn up by someone with all the time in the world and, interestingly, it is a list quite similar to such a one as made up by someone at the other end of life, without much time remaining.So I asked my daughter about this quiet-pathos thing, her being 23 and a recent graduate and living in Boston, all the same as Marnie; her reply: "As far as waitressing goes, I feel embarrassed about it at times, but I've actually made some valuable connections and now have places to stay and help finding employment if I want to go to South Carolina, Maui, Australia, or Columbia (have business cards/notes/emails from all of these people). Plus I make ok money, work with nice people, take home free food (ok, thats not completely kosher but its not like I get a salary or even hourly pay that amounts to anything after taxes). Plus, Im learning to speak Haitian Creole while simultaneously turning enemies into friends (the cooks didnt like me at first bc they assumed I was racist and told me so, but when I asked to learn their language they are suddenly happy to see me each day). So from my lowly job Im gaining: communication skills, agility training, extreme multi-tasking experience, networking opportunities, and employee benefits (that's the free food). Sounds almost ambitious when phrased correctly. This isnt to say I dont doubt what Im doing because I do, every day, multiple times a day. I get asked time and again by my bosses, co-workers and customers "why are you here if you have a degree from an Ivy League school??" One person even went so far as to say I was being selfish because letting my parents spend all that money to send me to a good school only to "disregard" my qualifications by working in a chain restaurant was just like throwing all that tuition money in the trash. Obviously obtaining "street smarts" and trying to experience different ways of life before choosing the "purpose-driven" one is something only misfits and failures do... So what am I trying to say here? Maybe im just trying to rationalize my own current existence when in reality it is just as ambitionless and lost as Marnie's. But maybe if the reviewers got off their NY Times and La Times high horses and really thought about what it means to EXPERIENCE and LIVE life, they might see things a wee bit differently. Or maybe not. Am I giggly all the time? as my friend Lynnea would say: "HELLS no!" But I dont think Ill look back on this period of my life and see it as a time of just "staying afloat" (my high school years on the other hand...)."One more take on the pathos meme, quickly, before getting on with the movie: Marnie celebrates her birthday quietly. Proactive note to lugubrious reviewers: this also is not pathos. What the heck did I do on my birthdays back in Boston? Who knows? I do remember being in a laundromat at North Station on Christmas Eve one year. It was snowing. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were in town, so The Garden was deserted except for me and an old woman. I went back to my room and drank. I still remember that, so I guess it means something to me, but I didn't feel pathetic at the time. I felt lonely but pretty good.Ginormous. I've had that word in my head. I'm thinking that if I write it down here, maybe it will go away.And so on to the first half of FHH.Oh my God. Bujalski saddles Marnie with an unrequited-love jones, up front. Booge, how could you? What were you thinking? This is something a novice twenty-something filmmaker would do. Oh, right. But this is why watching War, Inc. backwards helped the movie so much; the process cut out loads of unnecessary plot points till it was too late to matter. In the same way, I was able to watch the downslope of FHH without these moulting feathers of love annoying me. Hmm. Now Marnie liplocks some dude at the twenty-eight minute mark. I would never have predicted that. Oh, no, and then she osculates again three minutes later with her married-dude friend. I'm so glad I'm coming to this at the end and not at the beginning. Why? Because in the second half she's staring into the future without seeing beyond the walls of her room, locked in her head while her anger percolates unfelt somewhere down there lower in her body - after the drinking and smooching fail her - but I understood that, in the second half of the movie, without the presumptive romance-o-motivation of the first.No. I'm overreacting. Belay that last paragraph. I've been Hollywoodpavlovianized. This is not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the last minute of Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail. This is random lowkey young adult semijoyless evolutionary smootching, pebbles in a pond that cause no ripples. Marnie pretends that it didn't happen, isn't happening, and I'll do the same. Romance is a big deal for these kids, perhaps the biggest deal. My twenties were mostly a history of bad dates. Easy to put off career issues to the next decade while getting the living part right. So Booge perforce makes use of that, but not so much that we can't shrug when the lips meet, and then move on. But still, this series of fraught encounters with men, I don't know; quit beating the drum, Booge. This does remind me, though, that I watched the original Forsythe Saga backward. As with Marnie and Alex in the second half of FHH, something heavy had obviously gone on between Irene and Soames, and Fleur's life was constantly perturbed by it, but it seemed more romantic to me to not know what that something was, not to know what had happened - seemed more romantic than watching the first half and seeing whatever it was that happened actually happen. Thesis: nostalgia coupled with imagination is always stronger than dramatic invention, probably because lived experience, including the actual act of imagination, is more visceral than skoptophilia and its milder brethren.New-Age side note: Coincidence #1: Earlier in this screed I wrote a sentence using the word "evolutionary" and then I started FHH up again and watched the last ten minutes of the movie, which I hadn't seen yet (minutes 35 to 45) and Marnie says to Alex or Alex says to Marnie, "You're the most evolved person I know." Coincidence #2: Later that day, I went to Blockbuster to return Get Smart (I'm rating it "j" on a scale of 1 to q) and while there I picked up The Last Request, which somebody somewhere liked a little bit, and while I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I liked Get Smart and I said, Anne Hathaway is no Barbara Feldon, and when I got home and started The Last Request, there Barbara was, in a starring role. The odds of plucking up a Barbara Feldon movie at random? Antiginormous. Coincidence #3: Marnie's shirt has the number 18 on its back. I'm 18b. My daughter, I learned THE SAME DAY, is living in apartment #18 in her building on Concord St. Consult your Jung! These coincidental whorls in the universal fabric happened ON THE SAME DAY as Obama's election and mean that FHH is connected to the core zeitgeist of the planet. You read it here first.Propositions: (1) The first half of a movie is usually better than the second half when the movie is watched in normal order. (2) Watching the second half of a movie first often improves the movie. Sometimes, watching the second half is sufficient in itself. (3) Thus, perhaps whichever half you watch first is the best.I had to ask Wilson, who assigned this movie to me, what the last two spoken lines of the last scene were. They seemed crucial in defining the mood of the movie, but mumblecore being named mumblecore for a reason, I couldn't make out what Alex and Marnie said to each other. Fortunately, Wilson could. And those two lines bear out my contention, or so I think, that Bujalski is a deeply optimistic guy and FHH is, in the end, a celebration, not a paean. In that final scene, Marnie shows some anger, a desire to move out into the world, and a rejection of the feckless Alex. Good for her and good for a society and economy (knock on wood) where youth is able to rattle around a little. I watched a mumblecore movie made by Joe Swanberg a while back, in which the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless; Bujalski throws down some marbles in Marnie's path, but his affection for her never lets her fall hard enough to break anything.This film that launched a genre reminds us that being young and being old are two entirely different things. (Bujalski turned 30 this year.) http://www.spout.com/blogs/indieabby88/archive/2008/5/9/28417.aspx Post By: indieabby88
Post To: Bloggish review blog
Post Date: 5/9/2008 5:36:52 PM
Body: Well, it certainly took me long enough, but I finally got around to watching and reviewing "LOL," Joe Swanberg's movie about the effects of modern technology and relationships. I'd been hearing a lot about the Mumblecore genre, especially since the folks here at Spout have all but canonized Swanberg and his fellow Mumblecore artists as the patron saints of a new generation of filmmakers. I was curious to see how the movie lived up to all the hype. What I found was a movie that, while interesting, didn't really reveal its message until the last possible moment. In fact, up until the last fifteen minutes of the film, I was prepared to write off "LOL" as just another interesting but ultimately failed artistic experiment. The movie is about a group of friends (Swanberg, Kevin Bewersdorf and C. Mason Wells) each going through some relationship issues that have something to do with their addiction to online porn. These guys all seem perfectly normal and good otherwise, but when it comes to their relationships, the sexual disconnection seems to be a major stumbling block. Tim (Swanberg) has been unable to truly connect with his girlfriend Ada. Mike (Wells) is missing his long-distance girlfriend Greta (Greta Gerwig) and has her send him nude pictures of her, which she finds a little wrong, and he finds unsatisfactory. Alex (Bewersdorf) is obsessed with a girl who is the subject of several pornographic photos and videos on a web site. While both Swanberg and Wells' storylines are good, Bewersdorf's predicament is the most heartbreaking. He is so wrapped up in a relationship that appears to be entirely one-way while cute young hipster Tessa pines after him to no avail. Another neat aspect of the movie is the use of "Noisehead" videos between different scenes. Bewersdorf (who also wrote the film's soundtrack) is creating a project of his friends making random noises in front of his camera, and uses the clips to make unique songs. These videos are easily the most interesting part of the movie. My biggest problem with "LOL" is the fact that it takes so long to get to the actual point. I didn't really feel like I was interested in the movie until the very end, when I looked down at my video counter and thought "Really? There's only three minutes left on this thing? But it was just getting good!" I think Swanberg could have benefitted by cutting off about half an hour of the film's beginning and adding more onto the end. As is, the plot just drops off, with Tessa driving, disappointed, back to Chicago and Alex wandering around St. Louis looking for the online girl of his dreams.
]]>Fri, 09 May 2008 21:36:52 GMTindieabby88Bloggish review blog5/9/2008 5:36:52 PMWell, it certainly took me long enough, but I finally got around to watching and reviewing "LOL," Joe Swanberg's movie about the effects of modern technology and relationships. I'd been hearing a lot about the Mumblecore genre, especially since the folks here at Spout have all but canonized Swanberg and his fellow Mumblecore artists as the patron saints of a new generation of filmmakers. I was curious to see how the movie lived up to all the hype. What I found was a movie that, while interesting, didn't really reveal its message until the last possible moment. In fact, up until the last fifteen minutes of the film, I was prepared to write off "LOL" as just another interesting but ultimately failed artistic experiment. The movie is about a group of friends (Swanberg, Kevin Bewersdorf and C. Mason Wells) each going through some relationship issues that have something to do with their addiction to online porn. These guys all seem perfectly normal and good otherwise, but when it comes to their relationships, the sexual disconnection seems to be a major stumbling block. Tim (Swanberg) has been unable to truly connect with his girlfriend Ada. Mike (Wells) is missing his long-distance girlfriend Greta (Greta Gerwig) and has her send him nude pictures of her, which she finds a little wrong, and he finds unsatisfactory. Alex (Bewersdorf) is obsessed with a girl who is the subject of several pornographic photos and videos on a web site. While both Swanberg and Wells' storylines are good, Bewersdorf's predicament is the most heartbreaking. He is so wrapped up in a relationship that appears to be entirely one-way while cute young hipster Tessa pines after him to no avail. Another neat aspect of the movie is the use of "Noisehead" videos between different scenes. Bewersdorf (who also wrote the film's soundtrack) is creating a project of his friends making random noises in front of his camera, and uses the clips to make unique songs. These videos are easily the most interesting part of the movie. My biggest problem with "LOL" is the fact that it takes so long to get to the actual point. I didn't really feel like I was interested in the movie until the very end, when I looked down at my video counter and thought "Really? There's only three minutes left on this thing? But it was just getting good!" I think Swanberg could have benefitted by cutting off about half an hour of the film's beginning and adding more onto the end. As is, the plot just drops off, with Tessa driving, disappointed, back to Chicago and Alex wandering around St. Louis looking for the online girl of his dreams. http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2008/5/5/28210.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 5/5/2008 5:53:57 PM
Body: Before dealing with the end of the world as we know it, which this movie does not explicitly mention but which is lurking there in the unspoken background - before dealing with that, it being a pet peeve of mine, let me mention first an equally annoying pet peeve: many podcasters, the Spout podcasters occasionally among them, use the expression "begs the question" when they actually mean "raises the question." This error of diction has become so common in the U.S. today that it's probably useless to even mention it here, but since I heard it again on FilmCouch recently, let me remind those who might be unaware of it that "begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which an argument is assumed to be true without evidence other than the argument itself. Thank you. Meanwhile, back in the day, if you hated documentaries but had to write a paper on one, you could head down to Ninth and Trawler and catch The Nudist Story at the Jewel Box. The Nudist Story is the film where everybody plays volleyball with their backs turned to the camera. Otherwise, you were stuck with "Hemo the Magnificent" or "Our Mister Sun" or a training film explaining how to avoid the clap and why you ought to do so instead of chasing around after the girls at school who were reputed to be the biggest pushovers. These days, in addition to naked flesh, you can find lots of other quite acceptable entertainment in nonfiction films - crime and corruption in its multivarious forms, incest, child abuse, pedophilia, perversions both common and obscure, the apocalypse, and George Bush. Manda Bala, for example, will get you through the night quite agreeably, with a laugh or two, when you can't count on slipping a review of Hostel II past your Remedial English 2B class instructor. Manda Bala executive summary: That's all you got? But stand by while I rethink that. Manda Bala Cliff Notes: Frog farm launders money for massively corrupt president of the Brazilian congress; kidnappers are mean; a guy worries about getting mugged in Sao Paulo; bulletproof cars (if it's good enough for the Pope, it's good enough for me); plastic-surgery surgery, with blood and music that has a cutting edge; using a helicopter to avoid carjacking; no helicopter-jacking, sadly; and the clincher: politicians can be corrupt. "Manda Bala" ("Send a Bullet") is an expression common in Brazil but hard for me to explain in English, at least as I understand it (feel free to correct me). Imagine a situation like Iraq, for example - sixth year of the war, unrelenting violence, little water or electricity in Baghdad, a sense of inevitable disaster - you might look at that and just say "Manda Bala," meaning "What the hell, go ahead and pull the trigger." I checked out a few reviews of Manda Bala while awaiting my screener, just to pick up on the buzz. The temperature ran hot (except for Stephen Holden): "rich vibrancy of threat," "inexcusable violations of political faith and public safety," "hauntingly mounted voyage," "shocking and scary," "mesmerizing, tense, exciting," "a country and a society entirely out of control," "black humor and stomach-churning detail," "the ravages of political graft and unchecked crime." Documentary Grand Jury prize winner at Sundance. Cleaned up at the Cinema Eye Awards. "A film that cannot be shown in Brazil." Wow. Well, Manda Bala can't be shown in Brazil because one of the guys appearing in the movie told the young men who made it that he'd sue their asses three ways from Sunday if the film ever opened in a theater in that country. Always some sorehead out there with his hand in your pocket. So is it true that if the filmmakers have particular interests, a design, and a message in mind, but I don't share those interests, don't apprehend the design, and misunderstand the message, then how blame is apportioned between maker and viewer for the disconnect will determine whether the movie is good or bad? Because my executive summary above is not in exact accord with the thoughts and intentions of the filmmakers. I believe that in the last analysis, the principal interest of Jason Kohn (the director and principal producer - that is, the guy who made the movie) was to make a feature-length theatrical documentary with the film values of a mainstream motion picture - the values of a Hollywood action flick, for example. Like Earl Morris, and maybe because of Morris' influence, Kohn's aesthetic here represents the flip side of cinema verite, handheld video cameras, minimalism, and made-for-TV documentaries. For example, Morris prepares sets before shooting, recreates scenes, and uses the "Interrotron" - his invention - when interviewing (a device that, when used correctly, lets viewers make eye contact with subjects in the documentary). A Morris quote has it that style doesn't dictate truth, so that the handheld camera should not be a prerequisite these days for making documentaries. Kohn hates (his word) the common belief that content will always win out over form; that form is a slave to content. Cinematic effects can be used to make a point with style (vide The Thin Blue Line). There is a provocative element in this idea. Kohn invokes Robocop and Lethal Weapon as film models and Verhoeven, Ridley Scott, and Terry Gilliam as major influences. He wanted to use film rather than videotape in Manda Bala and was able to obtain 35mm lenses adapted for a 16mm camera. Manda Bala is shot in anamorphic Super 16; at 2.69:1, it's wider than Cinemascope. Kohn says that he made the choice in part as an anti-TV statement. At the time, HBO, the most profitable channel for documentaries, had announced that they wouldn't letterbox. Kohn also is bugged by TV documentaries that add footage to find a theatrical release. He wanted to make a film that delivers visually in the theater. He wanted to light sets, use dollies, and try out filming techniques used in action flicks. He said that film makes everyone look great, like an actor. He didn't want to go down to South America, a rich kid by Latin standards, and stick a handheld camera in the faces of the poor. (In the event, the poor onscreen are few and far between. In an odd turn, most of those interviewed about a country gone terribly wrong appear themselves to be saints.) As Kohn expresses it, he wanted to make a documentary Robocop. To him, documentaries aren't a separate form; they're just another genre. For example, Morris borrowed from noir when making The Thin Blue Line. Heloísa Passos won the Cinematography Award at Sundance for shooting the movie. I, on the other hand, received Manda Bala on DVD in the mail and watched it letterboxed on TV. I might as easily have watched it on a laptop or even on an Ipod. So while I can sing the praises of Lawrence of Arabia or a Terrence Malick flick as seen in the theater, I was never going to be watching this one there. So the sad fact is, I'm not in a position to comment on this aspect of the movie, perhaps the most important to its director. Besides, isn't this supposed to be a golden age for documentaries? Seems like most of the Rotten Tomatoes 90+ movies are documentaries, and there is quite a list of them. And if the theatrical version of a documentary is made with TV values and 30 minutes of extra footage, it might bug Kohn but it doesn't matter to me because I won't be paying $10 to see it in the theater anyway. And with the current lively DIY movement and mumblecore and me having just reviewed LOL for example, I'm not especially focused on the photographic values of a film, documentary or fiction, anyway. Although Ten Canoes did knock me out. So watching the film on my couch without knowing anything about what I've said so far, Manda Bala looked ok. It looked good. In addition to these theatrical and cinematical considerations, Kohn wanted to investigate several interesting subjects. In particular, he wanted to go to Brazil and shoot some footage of a frog farm that he knew about and of matters pertaining to a plastic surgeon that he had heard about. And in the process, he wanted to avoid polemics. In Kohn's opinion, feature documentaries are a poor way to push political agendas. With Bush getting elected in spite of Fahrenheit 9/11, maybe I agree with him. And Kohn wasn't interested in documentary filmmaking as journalism. Viewers expecting an expose or other newsworthy story will not find it here. Kohn wanted to go expressionistic, not journalistic. He wanted to experiment and discover what could be done with a documentary, not set out with digitized video in mind. Maybe do something like Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. I, contrariwise, am not intrigued by frog farms or plastic surgery and I don't have a problem with, and in fact might lean toward, polemical documentaries that observe high journalistic standards and push agendas. So that's another strike against me vs Manda Bala, going in. And the Sundance prizes perturbed my attitude as well. I mean, this is a film made by three very young and inexperienced filmmakers and needs to be, must be, approached and appreciated that way, which in my case, because of the buzz, sadly wasn't. Finally, Kohl learned that he needed a story. He needed to tell a story and make it look good. His second of three editors, Doug Abel, taught him what that meant. Kohn credits Abel with cutting the film into a coherent story. I could be interested in a story. A story, that I could go for. But to back up a little: Jason Kohn graduated from Brandeis in 2001 and got a job as a researcher for Earl Morris. He visited his dad in Brazil at Christmas, 2001, to look into the filming of the frog farm and the plastic surgeon. His dad knew a lot of folks down there and had some influence in the community; Brazil has a lot of poor people, and a collection of the super rich, but the middle class isn't so big. Then, in the summer of 2002 at the age of 23, Kohn flew down to actually shoot some film. He called a friend, Joey Frank, and asked him to come down for a couple of months too, to help in Sao Paulo. Kohn knew Frank from Brandeis, but Frank had transferred to Brown, where he was scheduled to graduate in 2003. When Kohn called him he was 21. Kohn's father is Argentinian, his mother Brazilian. His father had been robbed in his car four or five times in the past seven years and talked about it a lot, and also complained continually about the rampant corruption in Brazil. Jason knew that the frog farm was used for money laundering and that the plastic surgeon specialized in rebuilding the ears cut off kidnapping victims, and he thought that he might make a short film dealing with corruption and the country's concomitant street violence and how they might interrelate, with the farm and surgeon serving as framing examples for the central idea of the film. Frank joined Kohn in Sao Paulo and they asked a third friend, Jared Goldman, who was working at Miramax, to provide backup from the States. Kohn, Frank, and Goldman are credited as Manda Bala's producers. Kohn is also the director, Frank the assistant director. Kohn and Frank spent two and a half months doing preproduction work in Sao Paulo. They used Kohn's dad's house as one office and his mom's house in the States as the other for the duration of the project. Kohn had sold his car and saxaphone to raise money and had otherwise managed to raise 10K or so. Frank brought 10K too. The film began with a summer budget of 25K. Kohn talked Heloísa Passos into shooting the movie. Then they filmed the frog farmer and surgeon, and a detective on kidnapping detail, a paranoid businessman, a microchip salesman, an assistant attorney general, and a kidnapping victim. They came home with 25 hours of film, cut together a trailer, got grants from Sundance and Brandeis, and found an investor. As they worked on their thesis that corruption at the top breeds violence at the bottom, they came to realize that they needed more than the frog farm and some ear surgery to make a decent Robomentary. They went back to Brazil the next summer and shot 25 more hours of film. With that they had a feature film without an ending, as they put it. In fact, "ending" here might be code for "story," "arc," "compelling narrative." They decided that they needed a kidnapper in the film and waited around with 10K in bribes to interview one that they had found in prison. However, a bookkeeping error dealing with the exchange rate meant that they were 20K behind, not 10K ahead. And, the kidnapper was transferred to a different prison. The interview never happened. After finding, finally, funding for a third phase, Kohn went back to Brazil, hung out for six months until a taxi driver taking him to the dentist told him that he could hook him up with a kidnapper. Kohn met the kidnapper at a McDonald's, handed over some money, was taken to the kidnapper's home, interview him multiple times, and also got a brief interview with the corrupt politician at the center of the film. A final version of Manda Bala was cut together and finally, after five years of effort, the filmmakers had their film. Six months later it won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance. So, young men make a movie and it is what it is. No, it isn't what it is; it's something else. It isn't what Kohn says it is, exactly, and probably not what I thought I saw it was, but it's in the neighborhood of what it is. It really struck me how young these fellows were when my daughter, in her last year at Brown, mentioned that one of the boys from her high school, who is also at Brown, was friends with Joey Frank. Frank's Facebook page is not exactly that of a graybeard, either. After Manda Bala was released, Kohn and Frank in commentary and interviews seem to be finding their way a little toward an explanation of the movie that they had made. They represent Manda Bala as an impressionistic collage of scenes that, taken together, recontextualize the relationship of political corruption to street violence. I, however, took the movie to be telling me, as if I might not know it already, that kidnapping is currently a growth industry for the poor in Brazil. This was not Kohn's intention. He well knows that street violence in general and the kidnapping industry in particular in Sao Paulo are not expose-worth in 2008. City of God was released in 2002. In Kohn's view, while City of God (one of the great Brazilian films in his estimation) is a pretend documentary, Manda Bala is a pretend fiction. They make a nice pair. In fact, Manda Bala crew members claimed to belong to the City of God crew a time or two. Opened some doors. So kidnapping for profit isn't popular in the U.S. because there is too much risk for too little gain, penalties too stringent, and a strong law-enforcement focus on the crime. For example, my parent's house was robbed twice before the two addicts across the street decided to go for a bigger payday and were immediately arrested for kidnapping a kid down the block and botching the ransom pickup. But on the other hand, kidnapping for ransom is now common in many parts of the world. In 2007, Baghdad was dubbed kidnapping capitol of the world by whomever it is that does that dubbing. Previous title holders include Mexico and Colombia. You're also a high snatch risk in Haiti, Moscow, and parts of Africa. And in Sao Paulo. Manda Bala does get a little breathless over this fact. In the U.S., selling drugs provides the standard entry-level employment opportunities for some of the poor who can't get a job at Wal-Mart. We're just not into kidnapping-as-a-business yet. I was visiting in Bogota last year and my friend's daughter was crossing from her parked car to the front door of the apartment building one night and got grabbed on the sidewalk. A flash kidnapping. Her abductors drove her to a bank machine where she withdrew the max allowed. This was at 11:55 PM. They drove around for six minutes and then had her do it again. Then they drove her out to a dump on the outskirts of the city. She told them that she was a doctor working with the poor (which was true). Whether or not that was the reason, they let her get out of the car and drove away without shooting her. When the police brought her home, she went into her room and closed the door and didn't come out for three days. Meanwhile, the ear-cutter-offer in the movie tells us that his ill-gotten gains are spent helping the poor in the slums where he lives. A Hezbollah/Hamas/Sadr militia model of social welfare. I'm guessing that the vogue in kidnapping in the past decade has something to do with technology: the spread of cell phones, the Internet, and the availability and affordability of an arsenal of new, powerful weapons. In Sao Paulo, kidnappings are running at a rate of one per day. In Manda Bala we see, first, evil faceless kidnappers. Then, the tough cops who hunt them down like dogs (81 cops in a city of 20 million, poorly paid and prone to accept bribes). As mentioned above, the filmmakers try to find a kidnapper to interview. They learn about one in prison but the bribes necessary to get to him would have busted the movie budget, so eventually, by luck, they hooked up, through that traditional source of connections, the cab driver, with a kidnapper in a ski mask. (Hard to find a ski mask in Brazil? Couple of the classic ski resorts in the Andes have closed because their glaciers have melted.) This man in the mask had killed and would kill again (but as he tells us in his defense, he's mostly just killed policemen). He has robbed. He has kidnapped. He's done ears. He's probably instantly identifiable in that mask to anyone who already knows him, cop, neighbor, or victim, from his eyes, mouth, and voice. This is a man who has lived his life in the slums. Gives freely of his ill-gotten gains to his needy co-slum dwellers. Nine kids. Wife pregnant with number 10. For me, him talking about his family is the most affecting moment in the film. As he is interviewed, police snoop around nearby and the filmmakers are wishing that they had worn Kevlar vests for the occasion. Later, after the movie was completed, the police caught up with the man. He killed two of them and they shot him in the stomach and shoulder. On the way to the hospital, he acquired a third bullet hole, this one in the head. Juxtaposed with the kidnapping material are scenes documenting a serious case of political corruption. That juxtaposition is the point of the movie, not the fact of the corruption itself, which has been endemic in Brazil from the jump in 1500. Europe's relationship with the country was exploitive for centuries, as wood, gold, sugar, and coffee were carried off across the Atlantic. (And if memory serves, the pre-Columbian Native Americans were a shifty-eyed lot around those parts as well.) Regrettably, as I did with the kidnapping segments, I took Manda Bala to be informing me of something that I already knew, not recontextualizing the facts being presented. As I watched, I had the thought that finding corruption in Brazil is like finding penguins in Antarctica. You can make an interesting documentary about your discovery, but the basic fact of it is not surprising. Just to say again, Kohn wasn't finding penguins in Brazil, because he knows a hundred times more about corruption in that country than I ever will, for sure; just that it seemed that way to me as a first-time viewer of the movie. The politician highlighted here, Jadar Barbalho, President of the Senate (or something), took millions - make that two billion, so greedy - from the government via public works programs, and sent it out of the country while in the process created over 400 businesses to wash the money, employing the poor of his state. Who knows how much he kept for himself, but enough trickled out into the community to get him re-elected. Naturally he never paid for his crimes. Compare and contrast this with a president of our own who takes a trillion or so for a bogus war, most of which finds its way into the pockets of the corporations of his buddies. Would he have been reelected in Brazil as he was in the U.S.? But no more snark. I'm just sayin. An oil man becomes president and the oil companies make more money than any business in history. As someone asked the other day, if Colonel Sanders were elected and the price of fried chicken went up 500%, would anybody ask why? But no more snark. Those of us who are Americans (as we blithely call ourselves in the U.S.) live in an environment that fomented the savings and loan debacle of the 80s, the tech collapse of the 90s, energy deregulation and Enron, and the current mortgage crisis. What do I care about a corrupt official in Brazil when the government here has turned me and my 401K over to a global business culture as immoral and rapacious as any fallen angel let loose in the Sacred Heart girls dormitory on the Night of the Dead? Nah, I'm just kidding. But there is a reason to care about corruption in Brazil, in addition to simply exercising our basic humanity, a reason which I'll get around to in a second. Brazil wants and needs foreign investment, but the country's reputation for corruption is a problem for it. Lula da Silva ran on a platform to clean up the government, but whether he really meant that or not, he has encountered a bureaucracy designed, built, and endlessly refined over centuries to encourage and nurture bribery and all the other time-tested methods of fiscal chicanery specific to the human species. Voters hoped that Lulu's election would bring change, but money laundering and manipulation of large government contracts in thousands of cases like the frog farm have continued to be reported. Public trust in the political system is poisoned. Although Lula da Silva himself seems to have remained clean, some of his closest political allies have been or are being investigated. He governs by coalition, and coalition means political bribery. A mensalão (‘monthly pay-off’) bought votes in Congress; scandal resulted in 2005. Polls indicate that a majority of Brazilians still believe that Lula is honest, but only 16% trust the political parties to be honest. The government may be one of the most corrupt in history and that corruption interferes with the government's attempts to control the imbalance in economic status and the unrest and crime that it causes. If it were just a matter of humans preying on humans, the situations in this movie could be applied to many different countries. But unfortunately, Brazil happens to be home to most of the Amazon rainforest. I've already pointed out once, when reviewing Out of Balance, that the world is going straight to hell. But since that is sort of a trippy concept and there are infinite engaging examples that adumbrate the approaching darkness and chaos, a few more words on the subject might not come amiss. That is, forget about the kidnappers and their predilection for de-earing their captives. Brazil is busy tearing out the lungs of the world and has been for years. While Brazilian engineers tout the use of satellite technology to save the Amazon rainforest, loggers, miners, and farmers keep on cutting. 20% of Earth's oxygen is produced by the rainforest (soon to be remembered only as that place down there that gave Amazon.com its name). Marina Silva, Brazil's environment minister and an Amazon native, has developed a plan to stop deforestation, which is currently progressing at 1.3 million hectares a year. She breaks the problem down geographically into specific areas. However, in spite of Brazil's struggle to implement her plan, the country remains the fifth-largest global contributor to greenhouse gases. It's up there with the big boys: the U.S., China, and India. Deforestation is the second most significant source of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the world, contributing 25% of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. In a major operation in 2005, nearly 90 public officials, businessmen, and loggers were arrested. Environmental protection agency (IBAMA) employees charged with protecting the forests from illegal loggers had been accepting bribes from logging companies in return for falsifying permits to transport timber to markets within Brazil and abroad. The illegal logging takes place primarily in Mato Grosso, where environmental organizations estimate that two-thirds of all logging was being carried out illegally. IBAMA has been reorganized in an attempt to eliminate corruption, but it's too early to see if that's doing any good. (Care to hazard a guess?) I'm sure that you've read or heard factoids like "One square mile of rainforest can contain more than 50,000 insect species" or "One hectare (2.47 acres) of land can contain more than 480 species of trees" or "Amazon rivers contain over 2,000 species of fish." 1.5 acres of rainforest is lost every second in the world - 78 million acres a year. At this rate, 85% of Earth's remaining rainforest will disappear by the year 2020. 137 species of plants and animals go extinct every day. Every so often, a ray of light gleams out, such as a recent conference of 11 Latin American countries in Brazil, with Indonesia and Congo as observers, held for and attended by leaders of indigenous groups in those countries. They explored carbon-trading policies that would compensate thier governments for conserving rainforest. In Brazil, indigenous tribes currently retain permanent rights to 12% of the country and 21% of the Amazon, plus 49 million acres of "extractive reserves" for rubber tappers, brazil-nut gatherers, and river communities. They pressure the government, which promises to get tough on logging. Deforestation rates in the country have been declining for several years (with a spike a couple of years ago). But the good news doesn't stretch much farther than that. So while Manda Bala doesn't say much on the subject, here's a toast to that ticking end-of-the-world clock. Brazil is another of America's crazy brothers. When the awards are handed out for biggest environmental f**k-up, Brazil, like the U.S., could be jumping out of its seat to accept a gold statue in the shape of a dead planet. The sanctimonious super-rich in both countries are on their easy ride straight down to the hottest chambers of hell. Brazil, entrusted with the largest, most diverse, most important stretch of biosphere on the planet, contains the struggling yet increasing armies of the poor who are systematically reducing the country to barren baked red mud, so that "Amazonia" will in due course become a synonym for "Martian landscape." Governmental corruption, taken to a degree that proves without doubt that humans, who learned to walk long before learning to think, are true experts at f**king up the world and each other with no hope for the obverse in sight. A Brazilian friend told me the other day that at one point she was worried that the U.S. would send down troops and attack her country because of the way it is destroying the rainforest. I explained to her that we're happy to attack a desert country with oil under it, but that the current E.P.A. wouldn't know a rainforest if it found itself staggering around in one, or care. Another angle to this is Brazil's use of sugar-cane waste to produce ethanol, and the concomitant questions raised about the effect of this production on the environment - encroachment on the rain forest, the practice of burning the fields at harvest time, insecticide and fertilizer runoff, etc. We'll save this for another time. Anyway, do you believe that the Amazon will be saved? We can now see the scars on it from space. But I digress. In addition to the kidnapping and corrupt-politician threads, there are threads for the frogs and Mr. M. I know that the frogs are part of the corruption story but as I watched I just took them to be frogs. I know that they are an in-your-face unsubtle metaphor for the Brazilian people or the Brazilian poor or the Brazilian rich, or whatever, at least until they get eaten, but I remained oblivious to this idea while watching the movie. The frogs remained frogs. At what point in the making of the movie did Jonah, Joey, Jared, and Doug appreciate the metaphorical character of the frogs? Surely not before Jonah and Joey went down to shoot them for the first time? Mr. M, I know now, was meant to show how the current social situation in Brazil can engender a kind of paranoia in its citizenry but unfortunately, while watching the movie, I took Mr. M (originally from Tel Aviv) to be a sort of spokesman for the film's theses. Given my mindset, his exposition of the dire situation in the country went over the top to the detriment of the movie. So is this user error? Missing the expressionist vibe? Merging instead of contrasting the frogs and Mr. M with the kidnappers and the corrupt politician? Because Sao Paulo is huge. Skyscraper gardens. More money than the rest of Latin America. 20 million people is a whole lot of people, poor, rich, and otherwise. Within city limits, only Mumbai, Karachi, Istanbul, and Delhi are larger. (NYC is 9th.) For whatever reason, the sheer size and diversity of the city makes me want to take everything I'm seeing literally. The complexity seems too large for metaphor, too complicated to submit to Mr. M's simple paranoia. The first time in Sao Paulo, I was alone. I walked down to the edge of Paraisópolis, the city's largest favela, and sat down and watched the activity in the street. There was a street game of some kind going one, played by a gang of young boys. One of them, small but intense, was obviously their leader. When in due course they made their way over to me, I hired that boy as my guide for a week, paying him a lot even by U.S. standards. He turned his gang over to his second in command and took control of my stay in the city. By the time I left at the end of the month I was almost dead from exhaustion. By the way, Sao Paulo's U.S. sister city is Miami. Before finishing here, we must deal with the charges of sensationalism lodged against Manda Bala by various reviewers. The filmmakers dismiss the charges by pointing out that: (a) They're exhibiting reality. Calling it sensationalism is snobbish and elitist. It's the movie's responsibility to portray reality. The viewer needs to know that what they are seeing and hearing about is real. (b) The filmmakers are themselves curious. They want to see how things are, what things look like. (c) Kidnappees suffer. It's necessary for you to see that suffering, not just listen to descriptions of it. Regarding the surgery scenes, which were storyboarded, lit, shot using a dolly, but fortunately not rehearsed, I refer you to Nip/Tuck. Regarding the ear-cutting-off footage, I refer you to Fox News any night of the week and to my Abu Ghraib album. Regarding the guns, I refer you to The Wire. Rebuilt earlobes are hard because they're made out of rib. "I watched The Birds the same day they cut my first ear off. That night I dreamed the birds pecked my ear off." Jars of ears cut off with knives, scissors, teeth. "I said to him, How could you sleep? You cut my ears off last night." The filmmakers left out the footage of a frog eating an ear. They did not leave out the footage of a frog eating a frog. And that frog abattoir... the slaughtering and skinning and dressing out and carving up and flouring and deep-fat frying and eating of the frogs. Is this Fast Food Nation, or what? Didn't make me want to buy a bag of Frog McNuggets. Car paintball. Weener dog on pool slide. Wait a minute. Which way am I arguing here? Point is, the scenes in question don't rise to the level of sensationalism, not in today's suicide-bomber-a-day world, nevermind true docuporn. I remember sitting in Symphony Cinema II in Boston watching Mondo Cane in 1962. The guy getting hair plugs - that stayed with me. Would it be so wrong to put in at least one scene at a topless beach? What's wrong with the Sundance awards? We'll deal with that question another time. Is the film fair and balanced? Is it too dark? Is Kohn afraid to show anything positive because it might diminish the points that the movie is attempting to make. Does the lack of good news weaken the film's arguments? Just saw a headline in Drudge: "Global Temps Have Not Risen Since '98." See? From the NYT: "Good News From Brazil. The global economy may not be the happiest of stories these days, but it would be a far more tragic one had Brazil suffered a financial implosion in the past year, as many had feared. If Brazil, Latin America's largest nation, had defaulted on its $250 billion public debt, as neighboring Argentina had done, the consequences would have been catastrophic. The resulting panic would have affected not only Latin America, but all emerging markets." More good news. The rich are not getting poorer. And that recent epidemic of dengue fever, causing many deaths? The good news is that it wasn't the hemorrhagic variety in most cases, which causes a much higher death rate. Manda Bala II: The Good Politician, The Kidnapper Who Found God, and Frogs As Pets. The music track is excellent. So Jonah, Joey, and Jared worked hard and did good and I congratulate them. As Jonah says, "Making the first one is about making the second one." He's currently working on a screenplay. Winning a big award the first time out can be both blessing and curse. Let's hope that it's more of the former and less of the latter for these three. And if you haven't seen Pixote or Cidade de Deus, please do so.
]]>Mon, 05 May 2008 21:53:57 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog5/5/2008 5:53:57 PMBefore dealing with the end of the world as we know it, which this movie does not explicitly mention but which is lurking there in the unspoken background - before dealing with that, it being a pet peeve of mine, let me mention first an equally annoying pet peeve: many podcasters, the Spout podcasters occasionally among them, use the expression "begs the question" when they actually mean "raises the question." This error of diction has become so common in the U.S. today that it's probably useless to even mention it here, but since I heard it again on FilmCouch recently, let me remind those who might be unaware of it that "begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which an argument is assumed to be true without evidence other than the argument itself. Thank you. Meanwhile, back in the day, if you hated documentaries but had to write a paper on one, you could head down to Ninth and Trawler and catch The Nudist Story at the Jewel Box. The Nudist Story is the film where everybody plays volleyball with their backs turned to the camera. Otherwise, you were stuck with "Hemo the Magnificent" or "Our Mister Sun" or a training film explaining how to avoid the clap and why you ought to do so instead of chasing around after the girls at school who were reputed to be the biggest pushovers. These days, in addition to naked flesh, you can find lots of other quite acceptable entertainment in nonfiction films - crime and corruption in its multivarious forms, incest, child abuse, pedophilia, perversions both common and obscure, the apocalypse, and George Bush. Manda Bala, for example, will get you through the night quite agreeably, with a laugh or two, when you can't count on slipping a review of Hostel II past your Remedial English 2B class instructor. Manda Bala executive summary: That's all you got? But stand by while I rethink that. Manda Bala Cliff Notes: Frog farm launders money for massively corrupt president of the Brazilian congress; kidnappers are mean; a guy worries about getting mugged in Sao Paulo; bulletproof cars (if it's good enough for the Pope, it's good enough for me); plastic-surgery surgery, with blood and music that has a cutting edge; using a helicopter to avoid carjacking; no helicopter-jacking, sadly; and the clincher: politicians can be corrupt. "Manda Bala" ("Send a Bullet") is an expression common in Brazil but hard for me to explain in English, at least as I understand it (feel free to correct me). Imagine a situation like Iraq, for example - sixth year of the war, unrelenting violence, little water or electricity in Baghdad, a sense of inevitable disaster - you might look at that and just say "Manda Bala," meaning "What the hell, go ahead and pull the trigger." I checked out a few reviews of Manda Bala while awaiting my screener, just to pick up on the buzz. The temperature ran hot (except for Stephen Holden): "rich vibrancy of threat," "inexcusable violations of political faith and public safety," "hauntingly mounted voyage," "shocking and scary," "mesmerizing, tense, exciting," "a country and a society entirely out of control," "black humor and stomach-churning detail," "the ravages of political graft and unchecked crime." Documentary Grand Jury prize winner at Sundance. Cleaned up at the Cinema Eye Awards. "A film that cannot be shown in Brazil." Wow. Well, Manda Bala can't be shown in Brazil because one of the guys appearing in the movie told the young men who made it that he'd sue their asses three ways from Sunday if the film ever opened in a theater in that country. Always some sorehead out there with his hand in your pocket. So is it true that if the filmmakers have particular interests, a design, and a message in mind, but I don't share those interests, don't apprehend the design, and misunderstand the message, then how blame is apportioned between maker and viewer for the disconnect will determine whether the movie is good or bad? Because my executive summary above is not in exact accord with the thoughts and intentions of the filmmakers. I believe that in the last analysis, the principal interest of Jason Kohn (the director and principal producer - that is, the guy who made the movie) was to make a feature-length theatrical documentary with the film values of a mainstream motion picture - the values of a Hollywood action flick, for example. Like Earl Morris, and maybe because of Morris' influence, Kohn's aesthetic here represents the flip side of cinema verite, handheld video cameras, minimalism, and made-for-TV documentaries. For example, Morris prepares sets before shooting, recreates scenes, and uses the "Interrotron" - his invention - when interviewing (a device that, when used correctly, lets viewers make eye contact with subjects in the documentary). A Morris quote has it that style doesn't dictate truth, so that the handheld camera should not be a prerequisite these days for making documentaries. Kohn hates (his word) the common belief that content will always win out over form; that form is a slave to content. Cinematic effects can be used to make a point with style (vide The Thin Blue Line). There is a provocative element in this idea. Kohn invokes Robocop and Lethal Weapon as film models and Verhoeven, Ridley Scott, and Terry Gilliam as major influences. He wanted to use film rather than videotape in Manda Bala and was able to obtain 35mm lenses adapted for a 16mm camera. Manda Bala is shot in anamorphic Super 16; at 2.69:1, it's wider than Cinemascope. Kohn says that he made the choice in part as an anti-TV statement. At the time, HBO, the most profitable channel for documentaries, had announced that they wouldn't letterbox. Kohn also is bugged by TV documentaries that add footage to find a theatrical release. He wanted to make a film that delivers visually in the theater. He wanted to light sets, use dollies, and try out filming techniques used in action flicks. He said that film makes everyone look great, like an actor. He didn't want to go down to South America, a rich kid by Latin standards, and stick a handheld camera in the faces of the poor. (In the event, the poor onscreen are few and far between. In an odd turn, most of those interviewed about a country gone terribly wrong appear themselves to be saints.) As Kohn expresses it, he wanted to make a documentary Robocop. To him, documentaries aren't a separate form; they're just another genre. For example, Morris borrowed from noir when making The Thin Blue Line. Heloísa Passos won the Cinematography Award at Sundance for shooting the movie. I, on the other hand, received Manda Bala on DVD in the mail and watched it letterboxed on TV. I might as easily have watched it on a laptop or even on an Ipod. So while I can sing the praises of Lawrence of Arabia or a Terrence Malick flick as seen in the theater, I was never going to be watching this one there. So the sad fact is, I'm not in a position to comment on this aspect of the movie, perhaps the most important to its director. Besides, isn't this supposed to be a golden age for documentaries? Seems like most of the Rotten Tomatoes 90+ movies are documentaries, and there is quite a list of them. And if the theatrical version of a documentary is made with TV values and 30 minutes of extra footage, it might bug Kohn but it doesn't matter to me because I won't be paying $10 to see it in the theater anyway. And with the current lively DIY movement and mumblecore and me having just reviewed LOL for example, I'm not especially focused on the photographic values of a film, documentary or fiction, anyway. Although Ten Canoes did knock me out. So watching the film on my couch without knowing anything about what I've said so far, Manda Bala looked ok. It looked good. In addition to these theatrical and cinematical considerations, Kohn wanted to investigate several interesting subjects. In particular, he wanted to go to Brazil and shoot some footage of a frog farm that he knew about and of matters pertaining to a plastic surgeon that he had heard about. And in the process, he wanted to avoid polemics. In Kohn's opinion, feature documentaries are a poor way to push political agendas. With Bush getting elected in spite of Fahrenheit 9/11, maybe I agree with him. And Kohn wasn't interested in documentary filmmaking as journalism. Viewers expecting an expose or other newsworthy story will not find it here. Kohn wanted to go expressionistic, not journalistic. He wanted to experiment and discover what could be done with a documentary, not set out with digitized video in mind. Maybe do something like Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. I, contrariwise, am not intrigued by frog farms or plastic surgery and I don't have a problem with, and in fact might lean toward, polemical documentaries that observe high journalistic standards and push agendas. So that's another strike against me vs Manda Bala, going in. And the Sundance prizes perturbed my attitude as well. I mean, this is a film made by three very young and inexperienced filmmakers and needs to be, must be, approached and appreciated that way, which in my case, because of the buzz, sadly wasn't. Finally, Kohl learned that he needed a story. He needed to tell a story and make it look good. His second of three editors, Doug Abel, taught him what that meant. Kohn credits Abel with cutting the film into a coherent story. I could be interested in a story. A story, that I could go for. But to back up a little: Jason Kohn graduated from Brandeis in 2001 and got a job as a researcher for Earl Morris. He visited his dad in Brazil at Christmas, 2001, to look into the filming of the frog farm and the plastic surgeon. His dad knew a lot of folks down there and had some influence in the community; Brazil has a lot of poor people, and a collection of the super rich, but the middle class isn't so big. Then, in the summer of 2002 at the age of 23, Kohn flew down to actually shoot some film. He called a friend, Joey Frank, and asked him to come down for a couple of months too, to help in Sao Paulo. Kohn knew Frank from Brandeis, but Frank had transferred to Brown, where he was scheduled to graduate in 2003. When Kohn called him he was 21. Kohn's father is Argentinian, his mother Brazilian. His father had been robbed in his car four or five times in the past seven years and talked about it a lot, and also complained continually about the rampant corruption in Brazil. Jason knew that the frog farm was used for money laundering and that the plastic surgeon specialized in rebuilding the ears cut off kidnapping victims, and he thought that he might make a short film dealing with corruption and the country's concomitant street violence and how they might interrelate, with the farm and surgeon serving as framing examples for the central idea of the film. Frank joined Kohn in Sao Paulo and they asked a third friend, Jared Goldman, who was working at Miramax, to provide backup from the States. Kohn, Frank, and Goldman are credited as Manda Bala's producers. Kohn is also the director, Frank the assistant director. Kohn and Frank spent two and a half months doing preproduction work in Sao Paulo. They used Kohn's dad's house as one office and his mom's house in the States as the other for the duration of the project. Kohn had sold his car and saxaphone to raise money and had otherwise managed to raise 10K or so. Frank brought 10K too. The film began with a summer budget of 25K. Kohn talked Heloísa Passos into shooting the movie. Then they filmed the frog farmer and surgeon, and a detective on kidnapping detail, a paranoid businessman, a microchip salesman, an assistant attorney general, and a kidnapping victim. They came home with 25 hours of film, cut together a trailer, got grants from Sundance and Brandeis, and found an investor. As they worked on their thesis that corruption at the top breeds violence at the bottom, they came to realize that they needed more than the frog farm and some ear surgery to make a decent Robomentary. They went back to Brazil the next summer and shot 25 more hours of film. With that they had a feature film without an ending, as they put it. In fact, "ending" here might be code for "story," "arc," "compelling narrative." They decided that they needed a kidnapper in the film and waited around with 10K in bribes to interview one that they had found in prison. However, a bookkeeping error dealing with the exchange rate meant that they were 20K behind, not 10K ahead. And, the kidnapper was transferred to a different prison. The interview never happened. After finding, finally, funding for a third phase, Kohn went back to Brazil, hung out for six months until a taxi driver taking him to the dentist told him that he could hook him up with a kidnapper. Kohn met the kidnapper at a McDonald's, handed over some money, was taken to the kidnapper's home, interview him multiple times, and also got a brief interview with the corrupt politician at the center of the film. A final version of Manda Bala was cut together and finally, after five years of effort, the filmmakers had their film. Six months later it won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance. So, young men make a movie and it is what it is. No, it isn't what it is; it's something else. It isn't what Kohn says it is, exactly, and probably not what I thought I saw it was, but it's in the neighborhood of what it is. It really struck me how young these fellows were when my daughter, in her last year at Brown, mentioned that one of the boys from her high school, who is also at Brown, was friends with Joey Frank. Frank's Facebook page is not exactly that of a graybeard, either. After Manda Bala was released, Kohn and Frank in commentary and interviews seem to be finding their way a little toward an explanation of the movie that they had made. They represent Manda Bala as an impressionistic collage of scenes that, taken together, recontextualize the relationship of political corruption to street violence. I, however, took the movie to be telling me, as if I might not know it already, that kidnapping is currently a growth industry for the poor in Brazil. This was not Kohn's intention. He well knows that street violence in general and the kidnapping industry in particular in Sao Paulo are not expose-worth in 2008. City of God was released in 2002. In Kohn's view, while City of God (one of the great Brazilian films in his estimation) is a pretend documentary, Manda Bala is a pretend fiction. They make a nice pair. In fact, Manda Bala crew members claimed to belong to the City of God crew a time or two. Opened some doors. So kidnapping for profit isn't popular in the U.S. because there is too much risk for too little gain, penalties too stringent, and a strong law-enforcement focus on the crime. For example, my parent's house was robbed twice before the two addicts across the street decided to go for a bigger payday and were immediately arrested for kidnapping a kid down the block and botching the ransom pickup. But on the other hand, kidnapping for ransom is now common in many parts of the world. In 2007, Baghdad was dubbed kidnapping capitol of the world by whomever it is that does that dubbing. Previous title holders include Mexico and Colombia. You're also a high snatch risk in Haiti, Moscow, and parts of Africa. And in Sao Paulo. Manda Bala does get a little breathless over this fact. In the U.S., selling drugs provides the standard entry-level employment opportunities for some of the poor who can't get a job at Wal-Mart. We're just not into kidnapping-as-a-business yet. I was visiting in Bogota last year and my friend's daughter was crossing from her parked car to the front door of the apartment building one night and got grabbed on the sidewalk. A flash kidnapping. Her abductors drove her to a bank machine where she withdrew the max allowed. This was at 11:55 PM. They drove around for six minutes and then had her do it again. Then they drove her out to a dump on the outskirts of the city. She told them that she was a doctor working with the poor (which was true). Whether or not that was the reason, they let her get out of the car and drove away without shooting her. When the police brought her home, she went into her room and closed the door and didn't come out for three days. Meanwhile, the ear-cutter-offer in the movie tells us that his ill-gotten gains are spent helping the poor in the slums where he lives. A Hezbollah/Hamas/Sadr militia model of social welfare. I'm guessing that the vogue in kidnapping in the past decade has something to do with technology: the spread of cell phones, the Internet, and the availability and affordability of an arsenal of new, powerful weapons. In Sao Paulo, kidnappings are running at a rate of one per day. In Manda Bala we see, first, evil faceless kidnappers. Then, the tough cops who hunt them down like dogs (81 cops in a city of 20 million, poorly paid and prone to accept bribes). As mentioned above, the filmmakers try to find a kidnapper to interview. They learn about one in prison but the bribes necessary to get to him would have busted the movie budget, so eventually, by luck, they hooked up, through that traditional source of connections, the cab driver, with a kidnapper in a ski mask. (Hard to find a ski mask in Brazil? Couple of the classic ski resorts in the Andes have closed because their glaciers have melted.) This man in the mask had killed and would kill again (but as he tells us in his defense, he's mostly just killed policemen). He has robbed. He has kidnapped. He's done ears. He's probably instantly identifiable in that mask to anyone who already knows him, cop, neighbor, or victim, from his eyes, mouth, and voice. This is a man who has lived his life in the slums. Gives freely of his ill-gotten gains to his needy co-slum dwellers. Nine kids. Wife pregnant with number 10. For me, him talking about his family is the most affecting moment in the film. As he is interviewed, police snoop around nearby and the filmmakers are wishing that they had worn Kevlar vests for the occasion. Later, after the movie was completed, the police caught up with the man. He killed two of them and they shot him in the stomach and shoulder. On the way to the hospital, he acquired a third bullet hole, this one in the head. Juxtaposed with the kidnapping material are scenes documenting a serious case of political corruption. That juxtaposition is the point of the movie, not the fact of the corruption itself, which has been endemic in Brazil from the jump in 1500. Europe's relationship with the country was exploitive for centuries, as wood, gold, sugar, and coffee were carried off across the Atlantic. (And if memory serves, the pre-Columbian Native Americans were a shifty-eyed lot around those parts as well.) Regrettably, as I did with the kidnapping segments, I took Manda Bala to be informing me of something that I already knew, not recontextualizing the facts being presented. As I watched, I had the thought that finding corruption in Brazil is like finding penguins in Antarctica. You can make an interesting documentary about your discovery, but the basic fact of it is not surprising. Just to say again, Kohn wasn't finding penguins in Brazil, because he knows a hundred times more about corruption in that country than I ever will, for sure; just that it seemed that way to me as a first-time viewer of the movie. The politician highlighted here, Jadar Barbalho, President of the Senate (or something), took millions - make that two billion, so greedy - from the government via public works programs, and sent it out of the country while in the process created over 400 businesses to wash the money, employing the poor of his state. Who knows how much he kept for himself, but enough trickled out into the community to get him re-elected. Naturally he never paid for his crimes. Compare and contrast this with a president of our own who takes a trillion or so for a bogus war, most of which finds its way into the pockets of the corporations of his buddies. Would he have been reelected in Brazil as he was in the U.S.? But no more snark. I'm just sayin. An oil man becomes president and the oil companies make more money than any business in history. As someone asked the other day, if Colonel Sanders were elected and the price of fried chicken went up 500%, would anybody ask why? But no more snark. Those of us who are Americans (as we blithely call ourselves in the U.S.) live in an environment that fomented the savings and loan debacle of the 80s, the tech collapse of the 90s, energy deregulation and Enron, and the current mortgage crisis. What do I care about a corrupt official in Brazil when the government here has turned me and my 401K over to a global business culture as immoral and rapacious as any fallen angel let loose in the Sacred Heart girls dormitory on the Night of the Dead? Nah, I'm just kidding. But there is a reason to care about corruption in Brazil, in addition to simply exercising our basic humanity, a reason which I'll get around to in a second. Brazil wants and needs foreign investment, but the country's reputation for corruption is a problem for it. Lula da Silva ran on a platform to clean up the government, but whether he really meant that or not, he has encountered a bureaucracy designed, built, and endlessly refined over centuries to encourage and nurture bribery and all the other time-tested methods of fiscal chicanery specific to the human species. Voters hoped that Lulu's election would bring change, but money laundering and manipulation of large government contracts in thousands of cases like the frog farm have continued to be reported. Public trust in the political system is poisoned. Although Lula da Silva himself seems to have remained clean, some of his closest political allies have been or are being investigated. He governs by coalition, and coalition means political bribery. A mensalão (‘monthly pay-off’) bought votes in Congress; scandal resulted in 2005. Polls indicate that a majority of Brazilians still believe that Lula is honest, but only 16% trust the political parties to be honest. The government may be one of the most corrupt in history and that corruption interferes with the government's attempts to control the imbalance in economic status and the unrest and crime that it causes. If it were just a matter of humans preying on humans, the situations in this movie could be applied to many different countries. But unfortunately, Brazil happens to be home to most of the Amazon rainforest. I've already pointed out once, when reviewing Out of Balance, that the world is going straight to hell. But since that is sort of a trippy concept and there are infinite engaging examples that adumbrate the approaching darkness and chaos, a few more words on the subject might not come amiss. That is, forget about the kidnappers and their predilection for de-earing their captives. Brazil is busy tearing out the lungs of the world and has been for years. While Brazilian engineers tout the use of satellite technology to save the Amazon rainforest, loggers, miners, and farmers keep on cutting. 20% of Earth's oxygen is produced by the rainforest (soon to be remembered only as that place down there that gave Amazon.com its name). Marina Silva, Brazil's environment minister and an Amazon native, has developed a plan to stop deforestation, which is currently progressing at 1.3 million hectares a year. She breaks the problem down geographically into specific areas. However, in spite of Brazil's struggle to implement her plan, the country remains the fifth-largest global contributor to greenhouse gases. It's up there with the big boys: the U.S., China, and India. Deforestation is the second most significant source of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the world, contributing 25% of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. In a major operation in 2005, nearly 90 public officials, businessmen, and loggers were arrested. Environmental protection agency (IBAMA) employees charged with protecting the forests from illegal loggers had been accepting bribes from logging companies in return for falsifying permits to transport timber to markets within Brazil and abroad. The illegal logging takes place primarily in Mato Grosso, where environmental organizations estimate that two-thirds of all logging was being carried out illegally. IBAMA has been reorganized in an attempt to eliminate corruption, but it's too early to see if that's doing any good. (Care to hazard a guess?) I'm sure that you've read or heard factoids like "One square mile of rainforest can contain more than 50,000 insect species" or "One hectare (2.47 acres) of land can contain more than 480 species of trees" or "Amazon rivers contain over 2,000 species of fish." 1.5 acres of rainforest is lost every second in the world - 78 million acres a year. At this rate, 85% of Earth's remaining rainforest will disappear by the year 2020. 137 species of plants and animals go extinct every day. Every so often, a ray of light gleams out, such as a recent conference of 11 Latin American countries in Brazil, with Indonesia and Congo as observers, held for and attended by leaders of indigenous groups in those countries. They explored carbon-trading policies that would compensate thier governments for conserving rainforest. In Brazil, indigenous tribes currently retain permanent rights to 12% of the country and 21% of the Amazon, plus 49 million acres of "extractive reserves" for rubber tappers, brazil-nut gatherers, and river communities. They pressure the government, which promises to get tough on logging. Deforestation rates in the country have been declining for several years (with a spike a couple of years ago). But the good news doesn't stretch much farther than that. So while Manda Bala doesn't say much on the subject, here's a toast to that ticking end-of-the-world clock. Brazil is another of America's crazy brothers. When the awards are handed out for biggest environmental f**k-up, Brazil, like the U.S., could be jumping out of its seat to accept a gold statue in the shape of a dead planet. The sanctimonious super-rich in both countries are on their easy ride straight down to the hottest chambers of hell. Brazil, entrusted with the largest, most diverse, most important stretch of biosphere on the planet, contains the struggling yet increasing armies of the poor who are systematically reducing the country to barren baked red mud, so that "Amazonia" will in due course become a synonym for "Martian landscape." Governmental corruption, taken to a degree that proves without doubt that humans, who learned to walk long before learning to think, are true experts at f**king up the world and each other with no hope for the obverse in sight. A Brazilian friend told me the other day that at one point she was worried that the U.S. would send down troops and attack her country because of the way it is destroying the rainforest. I explained to her that we're happy to attack a desert country with oil under it, but that the current E.P.A. wouldn't know a rainforest if it found itself staggering around in one, or care. Another angle to this is Brazil's use of sugar-cane waste to produce ethanol, and the concomitant questions raised about the effect of this production on the environment - encroachment on the rain forest, the practice of burning the fields at harvest time, insecticide and fertilizer runoff, etc. We'll save this for another time. Anyway, do you believe that the Amazon will be saved? We can now see the scars on it from space. But I digress. In addition to the kidnapping and corrupt-politician threads, there are threads for the frogs and Mr. M. I know that the frogs are part of the corruption story but as I watched I just took them to be frogs. I know that they are an in-your-face unsubtle metaphor for the Brazilian people or the Brazilian poor or the Brazilian rich, or whatever, at least until they get eaten, but I remained oblivious to this idea while watching the movie. The frogs remained frogs. At what point in the making of the movie did Jonah, Joey, Jared, and Doug appreciate the metaphorical character of the frogs? Surely not before Jonah and Joey went down to shoot them for the first time? Mr. M, I know now, was meant to show how the current social situation in Brazil can engender a kind of paranoia in its citizenry but unfortunately, while watching the movie, I took Mr. M (originally from Tel Aviv) to be a sort of spokesman for the film's theses. Given my mindset, his exposition of the dire situation in the country went over the top to the detriment of the movie. So is this user error? Missing the expressionist vibe? Merging instead of contrasting the frogs and Mr. M with the kidnappers and the corrupt politician? Because Sao Paulo is huge. Skyscraper gardens. More money than the rest of Latin America. 20 million people is a whole lot of people, poor, rich, and otherwise. Within city limits, only Mumbai, Karachi, Istanbul, and Delhi are larger. (NYC is 9th.) For whatever reason, the sheer size and diversity of the city makes me want to take everything I'm seeing literally. The complexity seems too large for metaphor, too complicated to submit to Mr. M's simple paranoia. The first time in Sao Paulo, I was alone. I walked down to the edge of Paraisópolis, the city's largest favela, and sat down and watched the activity in the street. There was a street game of some kind going one, played by a gang of young boys. One of them, small but intense, was obviously their leader. When in due course they made their way over to me, I hired that boy as my guide for a week, paying him a lot even by U.S. standards. He turned his gang over to his second in command and took control of my stay in the city. By the time I left at the end of the month I was almost dead from exhaustion. By the way, Sao Paulo's U.S. sister city is Miami. Before finishing here, we must deal with the charges of sensationalism lodged against Manda Bala by various reviewers. The filmmakers dismiss the charges by pointing out that: (a) They're exhibiting reality. Calling it sensationalism is snobbish and elitist. It's the movie's responsibility to portray reality. The viewer needs to know that what they are seeing and hearing about is real. (b) The filmmakers are themselves curious. They want to see how things are, what things look like. (c) Kidnappees suffer. It's necessary for you to see that suffering, not just listen to descriptions of it. Regarding the surgery scenes, which were storyboarded, lit, shot using a dolly, but fortunately not rehearsed, I refer you to Nip/Tuck. Regarding the ear-cutting-off footage, I refer you to Fox News any night of the week and to my Abu Ghraib album. Regarding the guns, I refer you to The Wire. Rebuilt earlobes are hard because they're made out of rib. "I watched The Birds the same day they cut my first ear off. That night I dreamed the birds pecked my ear off." Jars of ears cut off with knives, scissors, teeth. "I said to him, How could you sleep? You cut my ears off last night." The filmmakers left out the footage of a frog eating an ear. They did not leave out the footage of a frog eating a frog. And that frog abattoir... the slaughtering and skinning and dressing out and carving up and flouring and deep-fat frying and eating of the frogs. Is this Fast Food Nation, or what? Didn't make me want to buy a bag of Frog McNuggets. Car paintball. Weener dog on pool slide. Wait a minute. Which way am I arguing here? Point is, the scenes in question don't rise to the level of sensationalism, not in today's suicide-bomber-a-day world, nevermind true docuporn. I remember sitting in Symphony Cinema II in Boston watching Mondo Cane in 1962. The guy getting hair plugs - that stayed with me. Would it be so wrong to put in at least one scene at a topless beach? What's wrong with the Sundance awards? We'll deal with that question another time. Is the film fair and balanced? Is it too dark? Is Kohn afraid to show anything positive because it might diminish the points that the movie is attempting to make. Does the lack of good news weaken the film's arguments? Just saw a headline in Drudge: "Global Temps Have Not Risen Since '98." See? From the NYT: "Good News From Brazil. The global economy may not be the happiest of stories these days, but it would be a far more tragic one had Brazil suffered a financial implosion in the past year, as many had feared. If Brazil, Latin America's largest nation, had defaulted on its $250 billion public debt, as neighboring Argentina had done, the consequences would have been catastrophic. The resulting panic would have affected not only Latin America, but all emerging markets." More good news. The rich are not getting poorer. And that recent epidemic of dengue fever, causing many deaths? The good news is that it wasn't the hemorrhagic variety in most cases, which causes a much higher death rate. Manda Bala II: The Good Politician, The Kidnapper Who Found God, and Frogs As Pets. The music track is excellent. So Jonah, Joey, and Jared worked hard and did good and I congratulate them. As Jonah says, "Making the first one is about making the second one." He's currently working on a screenplay. Winning a big award the first time out can be both blessing and curse. Let's hope that it's more of the former and less of the latter for these three. And if you haven't seen Pixote or Cidade de Deus, please do so. http://www.spout.com/blogs/paul/archive/2007/12/21/23080.aspx Post By: paul
Post To: paul on spout.com
Post Date: 12/21/2007 4:15:50 PM
Body: Mumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over Hannah Takes the Stairs and the rest of the mumblecore movies playing at IFC Center this week. Paul and Kevin review LOL (on DVD this week) and Quiet City for all non-new yorkers. FilmCouch #35 Subscribe in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday. Join the FilmCouch group Hannah takes the Stairs, Quiet City, LOL Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Paul
]]>Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:15:50 GMTpaulpaul on spout.com12/21/2007 4:15:50 PMMumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over Hannah Takes the Stairs and the rest of the mumblecore movies playing at IFC Center this week. Paul and Kevin review LOL (on DVD this week) and Quiet City for all non-new yorkers. FilmCouch #35 Subscribe in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday. Join the FilmCouch group Hannah takes the Stairs, Quiet City, LOL Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Paul http://www.spout.com/blogs/paul/archive/2007/12/21/23040.aspx Post By: paul
Post To: paul on spout.com
Post Date: 12/21/2007 4:15:11 PM
Body: I like the films coming from Swanberg, Duplass, Bujalski, et al mentioned in Kristin’s Mumblecore post. Kevin and I watched Joe Swanberg’s new film, Hannah Takes the Stairs at SXSW and I had the same response to it I’ve had to his other films (LOL, Kissing on the Mouth). I didn’t leave the theater riding on one emotion. I left talking about all the brilliant little gems, the pieces that are more relevant in his films than the whole. As Kristin put it, the films are a series moments so acutely portraying people trying to communicate. As far as labeling this family of film–and the friendships growing between the filmmakers–as a “movement.” Well, I bristle at the idea. What is it about coining a movement that (in this case before these filmmakers even reach the age of thirty) we find comforting? Does it somehow validate watching films which individually may confuse us? Now that they’re grouped together, like the French New Wave, are we now able to analyze them? Where as before, we just had to watch them like we would any other movie. If a group of like minded people gather together, it’s normal. But if those like minded people gather together and make something interesting, like European painters exiled to New York after World War II, they’re labeled a movement. Their work is not close and intimate, it’s recognized by themes and concepts demarcating that movement. In short, trying to stamp “mumblecore” on the work of a filmmaker like Joe Swanberg I think defeats what his films try to achieve: A moment of real intimacy and connection with the audience. The moment when a 25 year old girl sits in a theater wading through the film and suddenly says to herself, “Whoa! This is me! My boring little life is on a big screen and now, suddenly, it’s interesting!” Maybe now instead of having that moment, that 25 year old girl will say, “Hmm. This is Mumblecore.” Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Paul
]]>Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:15:11 GMTpaulpaul on spout.com12/21/2007 4:15:11 PMI like the films coming from Swanberg, Duplass, Bujalski, et al mentioned in Kristin’s Mumblecore post. Kevin and I watched Joe Swanberg’s new film, Hannah Takes the Stairs at SXSW and I had the same response to it I’ve had to his other films (LOL, Kissing on the Mouth). I didn’t leave the theater riding on one emotion. I left talking about all the brilliant little gems, the pieces that are more relevant in his films than the whole. As Kristin put it, the films are a series moments so acutely portraying people trying to communicate. As far as labeling this family of film–and the friendships growing between the filmmakers–as a “movement.” Well, I bristle at the idea. What is it about coining a movement that (in this case before these filmmakers even reach the age of thirty) we find comforting? Does it somehow validate watching films which individually may confuse us? Now that they’re grouped together, like the French New Wave, are we now able to analyze them? Where as before, we just had to watch them like we would any other movie. If a group of like minded people gather together, it’s normal. But if those like minded people gather together and make something interesting, like European painters exiled to New York after World War II, they’re labeled a movement. Their work is not close and intimate, it’s recognized by themes and concepts demarcating that movement. In short, trying to stamp “mumblecore” on the work of a filmmaker like Joe Swanberg I think defeats what his films try to achieve: A moment of real intimacy and connection with the audience. The moment when a 25 year old girl sits in a theater wading through the film and suddenly says to herself, “Whoa! This is me! My boring little life is on a big screen and now, suddenly, it’s interesting!” Maybe now instead of having that moment, that 25 year old girl will say, “Hmm. This is Mumblecore.” Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Paul http://www.spout.com/blogs/lopezdash/archive/2007/11/5/21414.aspx Post By: lopezdash
Post To: The Movie Blog
Post Date: 11/5/2007 12:52:44 AM
Body: LOL made me take a critical look at myself and the way I use technology in my everday life. My friend Paula refuses to get a Blackberry/Treo even though she would definitely benefit from one. It wasn't until I watched LOL that I understood why. I saw myself in Tim, Chris, and Alex and recognized the silent frustration expressed by my friends when I'm constantly checking my email or texting someone. Paula said she didn't like the idea of constantly being available to the outside world via email or SMS. She had the freedom to turn her cell off, screen calls, or simply say she hadn't checked her email - with a Blackberry this would be almost impossible. Are we more connected because of this technology? Not quite. I may be able to respond to an email from a coworker, but its at the expense of a conversation I'm having with a friend. The film is complemented by a series videoheads performance peices Although I constantly responded email during the movie (and at several points paused it to take a phone call) I can't help but think that LOL is going to have a profound impact on the way I construct my social interactions with others. Personal - read: intimate - relationships are counfounded by technology and LOL addresses this issue in a roundabout way. I think that technology can bring people together and build community on multiple levels, but it also gives people the ability to make complete assholes of themselves and the male leads in the film seem to do a very good job of the latter. If the film does one thing extremely well it was capturing those unnoticed moments in our every day lives where we allow technology to negatively affect our personal relationships (such as talking on a cell phone and ignoring a passenger in the car or interrupting an IRL conversation to send a text).
]]>Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:52:44 GMTlopezdashThe Movie Blog11/5/2007 12:52:44 AMLOL made me take a critical look at myself and the way I use technology in my everday life. My friend Paula refuses to get a Blackberry/Treo even though she would definitely benefit from one. It wasn't until I watched LOL that I understood why. I saw myself in Tim, Chris, and Alex and recognized the silent frustration expressed by my friends when I'm constantly checking my email or texting someone. Paula said she didn't like the idea of constantly being available to the outside world via email or SMS. She had the freedom to turn her cell off, screen calls, or simply say she hadn't checked her email - with a Blackberry this would be almost impossible. Are we more connected because of this technology? Not quite. I may be able to respond to an email from a coworker, but its at the expense of a conversation I'm having with a friend. The film is complemented by a series videoheads performance peices Although I constantly responded email during the movie (and at several points paused it to take a phone call) I can't help but think that LOL is going to have a profound impact on the way I construct my social interactions with others. Personal - read: intimate - relationships are counfounded by technology and LOL addresses this issue in a roundabout way. I think that technology can bring people together and build community on multiple levels, but it also gives people the ability to make complete assholes of themselves and the male leads in the film seem to do a very good job of the latter. If the film does one thing extremely well it was capturing those unnoticed moments in our every day lives where we allow technology to negatively affect our personal relationships (such as talking on a cell phone and ignoring a passenger in the car or interrupting an IRL conversation to send a text). http://www.spout.com/groups/Mumblecore/Re_What_does_Mumblecore_mean_to_you/489/21176/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: csprague
Post To: Mumblecore
Post Date: 10/25/2007 12:42:08 PM
Body: My favorite thing is when I google "Mumblecore" and they ask me "Did you mean Dumbledore?" I don't know why, but it makes me laugh every time.Anyway, I watched LOL this week and I have seen a few of the other films on the mumblemap (that's what I'm calling it from now on). At this point, I feel like a voyer listening in on strangers' tough conversations. These characters aren't really exceptional. They all feel painfully normal; leading lives that could be anyone, anywhere. No one seems incredibly thrilled by their situations, but aren't striving to create change in their context. They all seem like they are surviving or trying to sustain the worlds they have built to provide a sense of satisfaction with life, love and work. I just graduated from college and their story doesn't seem unfamiliar from the lives of my friends and I. A lot of these films seem essentially to be recording life as it's happening, its acting, but its not. Its life as art, which I find incredibly beautiful.
]]>Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:42:08 GMTcspragueMumblecore10/25/2007 12:42:08 PMMy favorite thing is when I google "Mumblecore" and they ask me "Did you mean Dumbledore?" I don't know why, but it makes me laugh every time.Anyway, I watched LOL this week and I have seen a few of the other films on the mumblemap (that's what I'm calling it from now on). At this point, I feel like a voyer listening in on strangers' tough conversations. These characters aren't really exceptional. They all feel painfully normal; leading lives that could be anyone, anywhere. No one seems incredibly thrilled by their situations, but aren't striving to create change in their context. They all seem like they are surviving or trying to sustain the worlds they have built to provide a sense of satisfaction with life, love and work. I just graduated from college and their story doesn't seem unfamiliar from the lives of my friends and I. A lot of these films seem essentially to be recording life as it's happening, its acting, but its not. Its life as art, which I find incredibly beautiful. http://www.spout.com/groups/Mumblecore/What_does_Mumblecore_mean_to_you/489/21067/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: csprague
Post To: Mumblecore
Post Date: 10/22/2007 3:14:15 PM
Body: The word "mumblecore" gets tossed around quite a bit, but it's been tough nailing down what it actually means. Rumor has it that the directors aren't even very fond of it. Perhaps, it's not the term so much as being lumped together under a specific label. How would you define mumblecore?
]]>Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:14:15 GMTcspragueMumblecore10/22/2007 3:14:15 PMThe word "mumblecore" gets tossed around quite a bit, but it's been tough nailing down what it actually means. Rumor has it that the directors aren't even very fond of it. Perhaps, it's not the term so much as being lumped together under a specific label. How would you define mumblecore? http://www.spout.com/blogs/quint/archive/2007/10/12/20733.aspx Post By: quint
Post To: An inordinate number of peppers
Post Date: 10/12/2007 12:01:41 AM
Body: So, while my computer was busying itself crunching some video in Final Cut, I thought it appropriate to finally get around to watching LOL. I've been putting it off because I was afraid I was going to hate it. I'm sure I'll never see it again, but it came early enough in my Mumblecore experience to warrant my indulgence.I think Mumblecore is a pretty awful term for what this is. It totally misses the fact that it's all about the meta. I felt all the more secure having just enjoyed the pleasures of round tripping a photograph into a transparency projected and painted and back into a photograph to be layered in with the original subject. Meta. That's what it's all about. Everyone has the technology to create and manipulate an artifact all the way back around into another manipulatable artifact ad infinitum. It's fun. What I see in Four Eyed Monsters and LOL is this propensity to play with technology. Also this desire to manipulate our own reflection. We see ourselves in strange new ways and have grown pretty narcissistic as a result. Here is an entire film of self absorbed people doing really cool things with technology. That's the story. There is no resolution, there is no development. What there is is a lot of meta. Three or more levels of reality are engaged in most shots. I am seeing you being filmed playing a video of yourself on your cellphone. Neat.I'm also seeing a lot of unhappy people unable to really make themselves understood, disconnected in the most immature ways, unable to decide on which layer of reality they want to participate and so, skating along in cynical bemusement while their lives fall apart. I think this is important. I build web sites all day and spend my nights and weekends trying to make as much art as I can with some perhaps misguided sense that I am create value along the way. That's a fact. It's hard to know. The process of creating entertains on so many levels that the artifact hardly seems to matter. What matters is the doing and we are closer than ever to having the doing be the artifact in a very immediate sense. I find myself indulging this strange new art of the meta just as freely in other forms. This is certainly the evolution of a YouTube aesthetic. I don't have a problem with that. I am much more concerned with what the mirror reflects.
]]>Fri, 12 Oct 2007 04:01:41 GMTquintAn inordinate number of peppers10/12/2007 12:01:41 AMSo, while my computer was busying itself crunching some video in Final Cut, I thought it appropriate to finally get around to watching LOL. I've been putting it off because I was afraid I was going to hate it. I'm sure I'll never see it again, but it came early enough in my Mumblecore experience to warrant my indulgence.I think Mumblecore is a pretty awful term for what this is. It totally misses the fact that it's all about the meta. I felt all the more secure having just enjoyed the pleasures of round tripping a photograph into a transparency projected and painted and back into a photograph to be layered in with the original subject. Meta. That's what it's all about. Everyone has the technology to create and manipulate an artifact all the way back around into another manipulatable artifact ad infinitum. It's fun. What I see in Four Eyed Monsters and LOL is this propensity to play with technology. Also this desire to manipulate our own reflection. We see ourselves in strange new ways and have grown pretty narcissistic as a result. Here is an entire film of self absorbed people doing really cool things with technology. That's the story. There is no resolution, there is no development. What there is is a lot of meta. Three or more levels of reality are engaged in most shots. I am seeing you being filmed playing a video of yourself on your cellphone. Neat.I'm also seeing a lot of unhappy people unable to really make themselves understood, disconnected in the most immature ways, unable to decide on which layer of reality they want to participate and so, skating along in cynical bemusement while their lives fall apart. I think this is important. I build web sites all day and spend my nights and weekends trying to make as much art as I can with some perhaps misguided sense that I am create value along the way. That's a fact. It's hard to know. The process of creating entertains on so many levels that the artifact hardly seems to matter. What matters is the doing and we are closer than ever to having the doing be the artifact in a very immediate sense. I find myself indulging this strange new art of the meta just as freely in other forms. This is certainly the evolution of a YouTube aesthetic. I don't have a problem with that. I am much more concerned with what the mirror reflects. http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2007/9/21/20003.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 9/21/2007 2:05:15 PM
Body: If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore.I mention this in case you're confronted with the movie LOL on one of those evenings when you in fact don't want an unscripted little semi-plotless handheld film, but instead crave a Hollywood-du-jour mind-destroying offering like those which are currently available at the Metroplex. No sense wasting a tasty little morsel like this one when you really want a Big Mac, to torture the metaphor. ***SPOILERS*** But no, actually, I don't think that I can spoil LOL for you just by writing about it. On the contrary, I'm guessing that the more you know about this movie before you watch it - the more prepared you are for it - the more you'll appreciate it. But if you're the type that likes to screen a movie cold, sans preconception and foreknowledge, then stop reading now and go do something else. Thank you.Meanwhile, from Joe Swanberg the director: "LOL more than any other movie I've shot was a process of throwing things into the pot and seeing what comes out."Out of the pot this time came three young men, Alex (Kevin Bewersdorf), Chris (C. Mason Wells), and Tim (Swanberg himself). The conceit here was meant to be that cell phones, PCs, and other electronic means of communication would interfere, ironically, with the boys' relationships with women - Alex with Walter (Tipper Newton), Chris with Greta (Greta Gerwig), and Tim with Ada (Brigid Reagan). Modest underlying plot points and arcs to the three stories are provided, but I didn't pay much attention to them, and still don't understand at least one of the climatic moments at the end of the film. In this respect, I treated the movie in the same way that I treat those complicated action flicks with convoluted plots. That is, I ignored the details and trusted that if I ever did take the trouble to pay attention, if I ever did truly make a study of the film, then all would in fact make sense to me in the end. But I didn't.In my defense on this point, it seems ok to me to watch the movie in the same way that it was made, which is to say, incrementally. Swanberg started out working on a little two-week to one-month film. Bewersdorf was back from Germany for his sister's wedding and signed up to do the music for the film. Tipper Newton agreed to come over to Chicago for a month. Wells was going to be leaving the city but had some time before he did. So forth. Without a script or shooting schedule, Swanberg went out every day, camera in hand (Panasonic DVX 100, 24p mode, 16x9, standard definition video because this was pre-HD, but nobody at the time was shooting with this except for documentaries, because it wasn't considered a narrative camera. And at least five guys handled it, depending upon who was in the scene), to see what would develop. So that instead of visiting Beversdorf's grandmother's basement once to shoot everything that they needed, for example, they ended up going back ten times. Then Swanberg looked up one day and eight months had passed and he was scratching his head and asking himself how this had happened. Ideas, bits, plot points, and the next thing he knew, he was wrestling with a feature film. Not to say that the results aren't worthy, but as a viewer I'm ok with letting the finer points of the interior story slide by the first time while I lounge back and take in what bits of invention, inspiration, and invention I can.I've seen the movie labeled by some a comedy, and Swanberg himself refers to hilarious scenes and the laughter of audiences at different spots in it. Although I liked the movie, I never smiled once. I know that LOL was filmed in the summer of '05, and Swanberg meant for the boys' techie behavior in the movie to be over-the-top comedic (e.g., video clips and pics transferred between phones, online stripper webcam, beatbox videos, etc.). But that's all normal behavior now.Anyway, Swanberg planned to put the three geeky guys in motion and, as they made a mess of their personal relationships, to follow along and record the hilarity that ensued. The movie gods, however, intervened.Alex, geeky guy number one, misses out on the girl in front of his eyes, the 19-year-old Walter, because, ironically, he is obsessed with Tessa, an online webcam suicide girl. ($5/mo. subscription)But wait. Alex's obsession with Tessa and his hopes for meeting up with her are not believable. Not these days. Swanberg says that back in the summer of '05, such naivete was still possible. No it wasn't. The immediate effect of this weak setup is to free us from the plot and allow us to pay more attention to the Alex onscreen in front of us.Or, no, hang on. When I was in college, I myself was obsessing over Freda, a young woman who sat 15 feet away from me in orchestra, holding a cello between her legs. I gave her a lot of thought, way too much thought, but I couldn't bring myself to actually approach her. Meanwhile, Sophie was stopping by my dormroom every couple of days to hang out and get high and talk about her boyfriend in Spain. Finally, after orchestra rehearsal one day, our conductor asked Freda and me to go out and put up some concert posters around the campus. We had just started and I was just warming up to finally ask her for a date when somebody ran by shouting that President Kennedy had just been shot. We split up to go watch the TV broadcasts from Dallas and I never did ask her out. Instead, she just kept soaking up my dating psychic energy. I now realize that Sophie and I... Well... She never did get back together with her boyfriend. And there she was, stretched out on my bed night after night smoking dope and eating Ho-Ho's. What the hell was I thinking? So maybe Alex's behavior with Tessa and Tipper isn't so unbelievable after all.But nevertheless, as for Alex being a geeky loser: first of all, Bewersdorf wrote all the music in the movie and it's not bad. I knew that up front and for me that knowledge manufactured some serious Alex aura onscreen. Plus, secondly, he had been living and working in Germany, which for me enhanced the aura. Thirdly, he did the A/V beatbox-type montage clips that divide up the movie and they're pretty neat. Fourthly, his dog Button is present. Alex feeds Button cookies. Must love dogs. Aura builder. Fifthly, Tipper Newton is right there next to him throughout the film and she obviously likes him. Chemistry. Sixthly, he's got a little Tim Roth vibe going up there. Seventhly, yes he obsesses over the webcam stripper, but she's Kate Winterich from "Kissing On the Mouth" and I was starting to obsess over her a little myself.(And, btw, speaking of how the movie evolved, Swanberg called Newton and described the project and invited her to Chicago to meet Bewersdorf and see what she thought about working with him. She flew out and showed up at a party where Bewersdorf was performing. Swanberg filmed her watching Bewersdorf, whom she hadn't met yet, and then her talking to him, and decided that the vibe was right, so he put that film in the movie as Alex and Walter's first meeting. If the vibe hadn't been right for him, Tipper would have gone back to school (she was 19 and in college and can be seen doing her homework onscreen in the St. Louis scenes) and the whole thread would have been dropped.)So in the event, Alex, the supposedly hopeless geek, builds a screen presence that might not equal Brando in "On the Waterfront," but ain't too shabby, either. By the time the credits roll, he's the man in this film. The way I read it, he wises up on his way back to Chicago from St. Louis, calls Walter, and they push the reset button.Geeky guy number two is Tim. Tim spends all of his time on his PC and cell phone. His woman fumes. He's hopeless! What a loser!But hang on again. This Tim happens to be Joe Swanberg. Of course the dude is working on his PC. Of course he's on the phone. His woman? Hell, he hired her to be in the movie. You're telling me that he's a hopeless geek because he's acting like Joe Swanberg probably acts at home? Let's ask Swanberg's wife what she thinks of the movie. Or go ask Kevin Smith's wife about husbands online. (Actually, listen to Smodcast and she'll tell you direct.)For example, there is a scene at the beach, with Swanberg working on his PC while his girlfriend flirts with a surfer dude. "You don't look too comfortable out there," somebody says to Swanberg on the commentary track. "Well," he says. "I hadn't been outside in three weeks."In other words, Tim and Ada aren't right for each other. If she was right for him, he'd log off/hang up more often. No way his phone and PC take the rap for the couple's problems in the sack.Speaking of which, I've had a Blackberry in my back pocket since March '01. Initially it was a litte thing powered by a single AA battery, with my corporate Exchange account on it and nothing else. Now it's been replaced by a PPC, a Treo, and a SmartPhone, all of them running browsers, media players, with phones, recorders, cameras, and other options I don't even know about. In bed before lights out at night, while the spousal unit reads a book, I'm surfing. And who's on the cell more during the day, my SU or me? Her. Swanberg says that he filmed the Tim/Ada relationship with the idea that the two were almost through with each other anyway, so how to blame the electronics? The two could be any everyday modern couple. So Tim, the supposedly hapless geek who loses his girlfriend at the end? He'll find a better fit next time. Or the time after that.You can see where I'm going with this.Geek number three, Chris, is winding down his relationship with his girlfriend over the phone. He's in Chicago and she's in New York. Greta never actually appears live in the film. Instead, we hear her voice and see pictures of her that she sends over the phone. As the movie progresses, Chris and Greta, onscreen and in real life, spiral downward, relationship-wise. (Swanberg, because he uses non-actors and no script, frequently employs the technique of filming real-life situations.) Meanwhile, Chris gets lucky at a party. I'm not casting the first stone here about that. Chris and Greta are essentially separated. The phone is the only thing left keeping them in contact.So yes, Chris does ask Greta for some naked pictures. Greta (the real-life Greta) was studying for finals and when Swanberg nudged her to produce, she closed her notebook, went into the college library bathroom, stripped in a stall, adopted a wide stance, took a set of photos, sent them to Swanberg on the spot, got dressed again, and went back to the books - in case you parents are wondering what your kids are doing at school this semester.Post-movie, I see Chris, like Tim, meeting somebody new, whom he can spend time with in the flesh.So this result in LOL - that the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless - reminds us that for the millennial generation, so called, as for most kids in their 20s over the years, it's the time of first experiencing true social connections and intimacy as an adult - life's greatest adventure, not to get sappy about it. In LOL, the actors and their characters are left free at the end to move on and seek out whatever and whomever comes next for them. In the meantime, if you're in the mood for it, spending 81 minutes with these young people could be a great idea. It was for me.
]]>Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:05:15 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog9/21/2007 2:05:15 PMIf I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore.I mention this in case you're confronted with the movie LOL on one of those evenings when you in fact don't want an unscripted little semi-plotless handheld film, but instead crave a Hollywood-du-jour mind-destroying offering like those which are currently available at the Metroplex. No sense wasting a tasty little morsel like this one when you really want a Big Mac, to torture the metaphor. ***SPOILERS*** But no, actually, I don't think that I can spoil LOL for you just by writing about it. On the contrary, I'm guessing that the more you know about this movie before you watch it - the more prepared you are for it - the more you'll appreciate it. But if you're the type that likes to screen a movie cold, sans preconception and foreknowledge, then stop reading now and go do something else. Thank you.Meanwhile, from Joe Swanberg the director: "LOL more than any other movie I've shot was a process of throwing things into the pot and seeing what comes out."Out of the pot this time came three young men, Alex (Kevin Bewersdorf), Chris (C. Mason Wells), and Tim (Swanberg himself). The conceit here was meant to be that cell phones, PCs, and other electronic means of communication would interfere, ironically, with the boys' relationships with women - Alex with Walter (Tipper Newton), Chris with Greta (Greta Gerwig), and Tim with Ada (Brigid Reagan). Modest underlying plot points and arcs to the three stories are provided, but I didn't pay much attention to them, and still don't understand at least one of the climatic moments at the end of the film. In this respect, I treated the movie in the same way that I treat those complicated action flicks with convoluted plots. That is, I ignored the details and trusted that if I ever did take the trouble to pay attention, if I ever did truly make a study of the film, then all would in fact make sense to me in the end. But I didn't.In my defense on this point, it seems ok to me to watch the movie in the same way that it was made, which is to say, incrementally. Swanberg started out working on a little two-week to one-month film. Bewersdorf was back from Germany for his sister's wedding and signed up to do the music for the film. Tipper Newton agreed to come over to Chicago for a month. Wells was going to be leaving the city but had some time before he did. So forth. Without a script or shooting schedule, Swanberg went out every day, camera in hand (Panasonic DVX 100, 24p mode, 16x9, standard definition video because this was pre-HD, but nobody at the time was shooting with this except for documentaries, because it wasn't considered a narrative camera. And at least five guys handled it, depending upon who was in the scene), to see what would develop. So that instead of visiting Beversdorf's grandmother's basement once to shoot everything that they needed, for example, they ended up going back ten times. Then Swanberg looked up one day and eight months had passed and he was scratching his head and asking himself how this had happened. Ideas, bits, plot points, and the next thing he knew, he was wrestling with a feature film. Not to say that the results aren't worthy, but as a viewer I'm ok with letting the finer points of the interior story slide by the first time while I lounge back and take in what bits of invention, inspiration, and invention I can.I've seen the movie labeled by some a comedy, and Swanberg himself refers to hilarious scenes and the laughter of audiences at different spots in it. Although I liked the movie, I never smiled once. I know that LOL was filmed in the summer of '05, and Swanberg meant for the boys' techie behavior in the movie to be over-the-top comedic (e.g., video clips and pics transferred between phones, online stripper webcam, beatbox videos, etc.). But that's all normal behavior now.Anyway, Swanberg planned to put the three geeky guys in motion and, as they made a mess of their personal relationships, to follow along and record the hilarity that ensued. The movie gods, however, intervened.Alex, geeky guy number one, misses out on the girl in front of his eyes, the 19-year-old Walter, because, ironically, he is obsessed with Tessa, an online webcam suicide girl. ($5/mo. subscription)But wait. Alex's obsession with Tessa and his hopes for meeting up with her are not believable. Not these days. Swanberg says that back in the summer of '05, such naivete was still possible. No it wasn't. The immediate effect of this weak setup is to free us from the plot and allow us to pay more attention to the Alex onscreen in front of us.Or, no, hang on. When I was in college, I myself was obsessing over Freda, a young woman who sat 15 feet away from me in orchestra, holding a cello between her legs. I gave her a lot of thought, way too much thought, but I couldn't bring myself to actually approach her. Meanwhile, Sophie was stopping by my dormroom every couple of days to hang out and get high and talk about her boyfriend in Spain. Finally, after orchestra rehearsal one day, our conductor asked Freda and me to go out and put up some concert posters around the campus. We had just started and I was just warming up to finally ask her for a date when somebody ran by shouting that President Kennedy had just been shot. We split up to go watch the TV broadcasts from Dallas and I never did ask her out. Instead, she just kept soaking up my dating psychic energy. I now realize that Sophie and I... Well... She never did get back together with her boyfriend. And there she was, stretched out on my bed night after night smoking dope and eating Ho-Ho's. What the hell was I thinking? So maybe Alex's behavior with Tessa and Tipper isn't so unbelievable after all.But nevertheless, as for Alex being a geeky loser: first of all, Bewersdorf wrote all the music in the movie and it's not bad. I knew that up front and for me that knowledge manufactured some serious Alex aura onscreen. Plus, secondly, he had been living and working in Germany, which for me enhanced the aura. Thirdly, he did the A/V beatbox-type montage clips that divide up the movie and they're pretty neat. Fourthly, his dog Button is present. Alex feeds Button cookies. Must love dogs. Aura builder. Fifthly, Tipper Newton is right there next to him throughout the film and she obviously likes him. Chemistry. Sixthly, he's got a little Tim Roth vibe going up there. Seventhly, yes he obsesses over the webcam stripper, but she's Kate Winterich from "Kissing On the Mouth" and I was starting to obsess over her a little myself.(And, btw, speaking of how the movie evolved, Swanberg called Newton and described the project and invited her to Chicago to meet Bewersdorf and see what she thought about working with him. She flew out and showed up at a party where Bewersdorf was performing. Swanberg filmed her watching Bewersdorf, whom she hadn't met yet, and then her talking to him, and decided that the vibe was right, so he put that film in the movie as Alex and Walter's first meeting. If the vibe hadn't been right for him, Tipper would have gone back to school (she was 19 and in college and can be seen doing her homework onscreen in the St. Louis scenes) and the whole thread would have been dropped.)So in the event, Alex, the supposedly hopeless geek, builds a screen presence that might not equal Brando in "On the Waterfront," but ain't too shabby, either. By the time the credits roll, he's the man in this film. The way I read it, he wises up on his way back to Chicago from St. Louis, calls Walter, and they push the reset button.Geeky guy number two is Tim. Tim spends all of his time on his PC and cell phone. His woman fumes. He's hopeless! What a loser!But hang on again. This Tim happens to be Joe Swanberg. Of course the dude is working on his PC. Of course he's on the phone. His woman? Hell, he hired her to be in the movie. You're telling me that he's a hopeless geek because he's acting like Joe Swanberg probably acts at home? Let's ask Swanberg's wife what she thinks of the movie. Or go ask Kevin Smith's wife about husbands online. (Actually, listen to Smodcast and she'll tell you direct.)For example, there is a scene at the beach, with Swanberg working on his PC while his girlfriend flirts with a surfer dude. "You don't look too comfortable out there," somebody says to Swanberg on the commentary track. "Well," he says. "I hadn't been outside in three weeks."In other words, Tim and Ada aren't right for each other. If she was right for him, he'd log off/hang up more often. No way his phone and PC take the rap for the couple's problems in the sack.Speaking of which, I've had a Blackberry in my back pocket since March '01. Initially it was a litte thing powered by a single AA battery, with my corporate Exchange account on it and nothing else. Now it's been replaced by a PPC, a Treo, and a SmartPhone, all of them running browsers, media players, with phones, recorders, cameras, and other options I don't even know about. In bed before lights out at night, while the spousal unit reads a book, I'm surfing. And who's on the cell more during the day, my SU or me? Her. Swanberg says that he filmed the Tim/Ada relationship with the idea that the two were almost through with each other anyway, so how to blame the electronics? The two could be any everyday modern couple. So Tim, the supposedly hapless geek who loses his girlfriend at the end? He'll find a better fit next time. Or the time after that.You can see where I'm going with this.Geek number three, Chris, is winding down his relationship with his girlfriend over the phone. He's in Chicago and she's in New York. Greta never actually appears live in the film. Instead, we hear her voice and see pictures of her that she sends over the phone. As the movie progresses, Chris and Greta, onscreen and in real life, spiral downward, relationship-wise. (Swanberg, because he uses non-actors and no script, frequently employs the technique of filming real-life situations.) Meanwhile, Chris gets lucky at a party. I'm not casting the first stone here about that. Chris and Greta are essentially separated. The phone is the only thing left keeping them in contact.So yes, Chris does ask Greta for some naked pictures. Greta (the real-life Greta) was studying for finals and when Swanberg nudged her to produce, she closed her notebook, went into the college library bathroom, stripped in a stall, adopted a wide stance, took a set of photos, sent them to Swanberg on the spot, got dressed again, and went back to the books - in case you parents are wondering what your kids are doing at school this semester.Post-movie, I see Chris, like Tim, meeting somebody new, whom he can spend time with in the flesh.So this result in LOL - that the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless - reminds us that for the millennial generation, so called, as for most kids in their 20s over the years, it's the time of first experiencing true social connections and intimacy as an adult - life's greatest adventure, not to get sappy about it. In LOL, the actors and their characters are left free at the end to move on and seek out whatever and whomever comes next for them. In the meantime, if you're in the mood for it, spending 81 minutes with these young people could be a great idea. It was for me. http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/music/MemberTagFilms.aspxmusic
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]]>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:08:16 GMT3177Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/lol/MemberTagFilms.aspxlol
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]]>Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:05:11 GMT777Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/mumblecore/MemberTagFilms.aspxmumblecore
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