Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey  (1991)

• The scariest entry on Mahalo’s list of Best Evil Robots? Definitely Evil Bill and Ted.
• The Tisch Film Review alerts us to Jean Eustache’s Circle, a weekly series at New York’s French Institute/Alliance Francaise beginning April 1. “Folks, this is essential viewing,” says Alex Ross Perry.
• Oh, the irony: this Blue Velvet inspired cake looks bloody, but it’s totally vegan. It makes me want to sponsor a David Lynch Bake-Off.

Under discussion:

Stop-Loss  (2007)

There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, as if there’s some kind of collective embarrassment over the fact that this highly-stylized policy polemic––literally, an MTV Film––is seeing the light of day so many months after last fall’s D.O.A. Iraq movie wave. Mainstream reviews have so far been mixed, and blog chatter has (predictably) skewed towards suspicious, but there’s one potential audience sector that’s apparently not ready to write it off yet: actual veterans.

In a post at Eat the Press on military media, Rachel Sklar points to this post at VetVoice.com, where members of the community weigh in on the Stop-Loss trailer. Of the 17 comments on the post as of this writing, most express some interest in seeing the film, even if it’s just to justify the commenter’s previously held assumptions that Hollywood is ideologically out of touch and, in terms of military accuracy, either willfully ignorant or just plain incompetent. As ThisDudesArmy puts it, “Me and some buddies are going opening day. Planning on laughing at all the inaccurate hoopla. Just from one promo picture I saw, there were two guys in a parade with CIBs, but no combat patch. Yikes!” Another commenter argues that even if a movie like this gets details wrong, he/she will still pay money to see it because “If the mainstream media is going to continue to keep Iraq off the public’s radar screen, then culture has to pick up the ball.”

But accuracy might be a double-edged sword. As clejeune puts it in a comment titled “Would love to see it, but won’t”: “Movies like this are either too hokey, and I pick them apart, or they are way too real, and I’m up all night.” It’s a losing proposition either way. Are contemporary war films failing because we’re asking them to strike a balance––in terms of political stance, in terms of moral address, in terms of realism––that may be impossible to achieve?

Under discussion:

Red Desert  (1964)

Another season of MTV’s faux-reality melodrama and grade-A guilty pleasure The Hills debuted last night, and it was greeted by yet another New York Times review comparing its “plotlessness and dreamy cinematography” to the cinematic style of Michaelangelo Antonioni. As you know, I’m a big fan of cinema-conscious analyses of the Hills. But when the NYT’s Ginia Bellafonte calls The Hills (a highly manipulated soap opera about “real” people, produced for the consumption of young, female mass audience) “Antonioni-esque,” what does she actually mean? I carefully watched the season premiere this morning on MTV.com and came up with five areas where this tale of California blondes of the aughts converge with Antonioni’s mid-to-late century masterpieces of modern isolation.
1: Pressures of modern life and relationships lead to physical illness. When Lauren and Whitney arrive in Paris, their itinerary says they’re supposed to go to Colette to pick up shoes “for the girls,” and then pick up their own ballgowns at Alberti Ferretti. At Lauren’s urging, she and Whitney get the gowns first, and by the time they arrive at Colette, the store is closed. Without blaming her friend and co-worker with actual words (see Item 2), Whitney has a physical breakdown in the back seat of the car. “Ugh, I’m so nausous,” she says. “Deep breaths, deep breaths, deep breaths…” She then throws her head back and has some kind of minor seizure, involving much tongue flippage. Lauren looks on with eyes progressiely narrowed, as if to say, “What the **** is your problem?”

Antonioni film that this is JUST LIKE: Red Desert (above), in which the industrial city of Revenna is painted (literally––Antonioni took an extraordinary degree of control over the set design of his first color film) as a toxic wasteland, pushing Monica Vitti from run-of-the-mill ennui to a psychosomatic sickness that no one else understands.

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