analogzombie Blog

I was talking to friend about it the other night. "Yeah i've seen his movie Nowhere, and that's exactly where that film goes." This sort of sentiment seems par for the course for Gregg Araki. His previous movies, epitmoized by Nowhere and The Doom Generation, are sort of hellish teenage character studies. Movies with unbelievable characters engaged in mundane daily life, in a sureallist punk landscape. Typecast as part of 'the New Queer Cinema' of the early nineties, Araki is often chastised for making films that lack depth. I've always understood this view, but I defend his work as fevered wish fulfillments. Movies whose point isn't in the message, but in the telling. So now he comes out of left field with a real film. An accomplished work that, while containing definite Araki style, is unlike anything he's made before. This is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, to quote Dave Eggars.

Mysterious Skin tells the story of two Kansas youths who are molested by thier little league coach at the age of 9. This becomes the dominant event in both their lives but with very different consequences. Neil embraces the escapades with 'Coach' as a type of paternal love. He feels special, and unique from all the attention. The wierd sex games he's asked to participate in carry with them the promise of a caring adult. Coach stands in contrast to Neil's mother, who for all her good intentions and genuine love for her son, is nonetheless an absentee mother. Prefering to spend time with various boyfriends, than pay attantion to her child. Brian's homelife on the other hand seems at first to be a bit more normal. He has a loving mother, patient older sister and enjoys a modest middle class life. Brian too though, is bereft a suitable father figure. His own, more inclined to a kind of apathetic parenting.

The film opens with a scene of young Neil in a state of pure joy. Cereal raining over him, he laughs and smiles to the sound of angelic music. This is not what one might expect from a moive about child abuse. Coach's seduction techniques are much closer to reality than you usually see in a film of the same subject. He's likable, cool, and attractive. This is a guy we'd want to hang out with. Instead of showing him a pure monster, Araki shows how the monster fools everyone.

Neil's experience dominates the first third of the movie. Brian's experience is told mainly through the aftermath of the event, and later, in flash back. For Brian, this was not an initiation into the world of emotionless sex. It was a severely traumatic event. So affecting, that young Brian blocks the experience out, causing him to suffer from psychosomatic symptoms.

As it moves into its main section, concerned with the boys around the age of 19 it becomes clear how crippled Brian and Neil actually are. Now a male prostitute, Neil tries to contextualize his experience by submersing himself in a world of emotionless sex for hire. Brian on the other hand is a complete introvert, 'wierdly asexual' as one character describes him. All of his lost time, and eerie circumstances, coupled with dreams of a vague presence hovering over him, have convinced him that he was abducted by aliens. His frantic search for truth eventually leads him to Neil, and the truth and absolution they've been respectively searching for.

The movie is not about coach. It's about Neil and Brian, it's about the effect the abuse they endured has had on them. Coach is a catalyst, something to set the stage, nothing more. Yet he is shown as a complex character. It would be easy to write him off as evil, and he most assuredly is, but this isn't his story.

By far, Mysterious Skin, is Gregg Araki's best film to date. There are times when the flair of Doom Generation is present, as in some of Neil's encounters, or the movies Brian watches For the most part,though, this feels like the beginning of a new phase of filmmaking for the director. Who knew he was actually this talented. It's dreamy and brutal all at the same time. When the credits finally roll, you can't helped but be gripped with a realization of the sheer, unbridled horror of it all.

The screening I attended with filled with gasps and shrieks, as the mostly middle aged gay male crowd suddenly realized they weren't watching a 'New Queer Cinema' movie, but one from a pure artist. They had gotten in way over their heads by underestimating Araki, and he made them pay dearly for it.

John Cassavetes' Shadows is a film that will change you opinion of what cinema is capable of.

Shot in 1957, with reshoots a year later, the film tells the story of Lelia and Tommy, young lovers who spend a night together and then are ripped apart by their own very human flaws. The film focuses on a family of three bi-racial siblings living together in New York. Hugh is the oldest brother, darkest skinned, and a jazz singer. Younger brother Benny is a fair skinned rastabout who lives by night, and is only out for kicks. Youngest Lelia is the fairest of the bunch and is mired in the fantasy of female youth. Idelaistic, and apiringly intellectual, Lelia meets Tommy at a literary party. Like all of the people Lelia regularly hangs out with, Tommy is white. This is the central issue with the film, the real drama begins once TOmmy has met Lelia's brother Hugh and is blindsided with her race. It's not so much revulsion he feels, but guilt, for feeling revolted. This sends the family into a circling of the wagons around Lelia, whomust now cometoterms with the world she lives in.

The story of Shadows is fairly basic. A lot of what comprises the film isn't germaine to the plot. This is because it was born out of the improvisations Cassavetes was conducting in his acting classes. The idea was to improve until you came up with believable characters and situations, and then rehearse them until they were second nature and you truly embodied them. Only then would the actor be able to catch the reality of emotion Cassavetes was after. His approach was to shoot, and shoot, and shoot some more. Anything until the performance was on film. In later pictures he would find other techniques to ellicit the raw emotion that is the standard of all his films. But Shadows achieved it through perseverance. Working at each role until it was a real person, the actors were able to truly convey.

The heart and story are in the eyes, the glances, the body language, the bursts of excitement, and the flaws of every character in Shadows. Besides being the birth of modern American Independent Cinema, it's also adamm good movie, rough and raw, literally bleeding with feeling.

In 1979 Werner Herzog set out to make Fittzcarraldo, a story about a caucho era rubber baron who tried to pull a steam ship over a mountain to bring opera to Quito. This a documentary about that shoot.

With everything from native indian attacks, wild accusations about Herzog executing workers en masse, less than competant engineers, last minute recasting, screaming fits from the lead actor, and cost overages, the last thing Herzog had to worry about was actually pulling a real boat over a real mountain. Yet, he achieved that, and finished his film to boot.

Burden of Dreams is a window into the mind of a mad genius. Herzog is shown as an artist so clear about his art that he will literally and metaphorically push himself, and those around him, to the brink of destruction. Director Les Blank's camera finds him at the production's most honest points. He chooses to focus on the lives of the natives that have come to take part in the film, as much as on Kinski and the director. What develops is a film that is more than a making of, more than a portarit of an artist at work. What emerges is a story as engaging as Fittzcarraldo. Herzog and his main character have fused into a single being. It is no surpruise then, that the task of pulling the ship over the mountain is not only completely real, but also more difficult than what was done in events that inspired the film. The real Fittzcarraldo disected the ship into hundreds of parts to be reassembled on the other side of the river. The film and necessarily the ship wrenching act itself have become almost an obsession. As Werner states in the documentary "I live or die with this film."