quint

Under discussion:

Heimat  (1984)

My father's side of my family is German. They came to America in the late 19th century, looking for work and opportunity in the furniture trade. My great great grandfather was a cabinet maker and an otherwise successful future was cut short by tragedy in 1929 when my great grandfather, an only child, was killed in a night club fire in Detroit just one month before the stock market crash. He left one son behind, my grandfather, and that narrow thread leads to me. 

I've spent a good deal of time at the library trying to reconnect with these roots. To understand the patterns of thought in my own mind. It's a romantic dream I suppose. The stories handed down to me feel more like legends than truths. Among them is the fact that an ancestor of mine was once the burgermeister of Baden-Baden. My grandfather was supposedly among the first to cross the bridge into Baden-Baden, liberating that town with the Third Army. He shot a Nazi officer and took a French police pistol off his body. This is now in my father's possession. A family treasure. 

Watching this series was the most powerful signifier of the characteristics I inherited down this path. It traces an extended German family in a small village in the Hunsbuck from the end of WWI to 1982. There were innumerable moments watching this series (Netflix has it) where I recognized myself in the choices characters made. This sort of cultural resonance was a real coming home for me. 

Maria, Paul, Anton, Hermann, Maria Goot, Glassich: these were like long lost family. When Anton goes to Baden-Baden to visit Paul to ask his advice about the sale of his optics company to a multi-national corporation, I was on the edge of my seat. That was my ancestral home. Finally, I got a taste of that German spa town. Baden-Baden. My Baden-Baden. 

I've always been a fan of German cinema. Fassbinder and Herzog have inspired me and confounded me. But here, with this monumental work by Edgar Reitz and the sequels, I have a true glimpse of what my family history might have been had we stayed in Germany all those years ago. 

My family's history could have easily been a branch of this tree, a narrow thread off in America that might have circled back around to attend a funeral if the timing were right, much like the Brazilians who attended Maria's funeral. 

This connection to what is German in me is a great service Reitz has done for the German people. I can't express enough how important this series has been to me. When Glassich scooted his chair closer to the speakers to hear over the racket of confused pub patrons the premiere of Hermann's avant-garde composition, (poor Glassich the town fool, his scabby hands hidden in his gloves), his eyes wide, his lips open, he alone hearing the beautiful sound of the nightingale amidst the electronic processing, he alone overwhelmed with the beauty, I wept as well. I felt like poor Glassich, hearing at last the strange and beautiful music of his homeland.

Under discussion:

Night of the Living Dead  (1968)

Tape  (2001)

Bug  (2006)

Like many people, I thought Bug was a horror movie, but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't. Instead, this is an intriguing psychological study of the illusions we'll endure for the promise of love. 

The movie that comes to mind is Richard Linklater's Tape. It is perhaps just the off-Broadway feel. Night of the Living Dead has a similar economy. 

Ashley Judd is excellent, but the movie's main flaw is with her character. There is not enough to convince me of her desperation. Sure, she is a white trash woman with a lot to regret, but her endurance is what I am most convinced of. 

Harry Connick, Jr. is more Tony Franciosa than ever. He is a wicked thug. Michael Shannon is a pleasant surprise.

After the set up, the movie changes character significantly, but never quite outlives it's pretenses. Craziness kicks into high gear out of the blue. Harry Connick's character falls by the wayside. The climax has to come because all sympathy is blasted from the characters. Still, I enjoyed the ride.

Under discussion:

Purple Violets  (2007)

Here's an interesting development:

“Purple Violets” premieres exclusively on iTunes

Under discussion:

A Certain Kind of Death  (2002)

I recently watched A Certain Kind of Death on netflix on demand and was glad for it. This is a cinema verite style documentary in the tradition of Frederick Wiseman. It follows a series of corpses. People who died without next of kin. People who have only the machinery of society to see them through last details. A sad subject. What happens to a person who dies without anyone. There are many horrifying images of death here. What happens when a body is discovered 4 weeks after death? Oy, do you really want to know?

Well, the body passes through a variety of beurocratic hurdles and ends up in the ground somehow. Things are auctioned to cover various expenses. Whatever preperations were made are discovered. It is all very systematic.

So who are these people? That is what this movie tries to get to. A gay man who has outlived his lover, all his papers in order, his grave paid for. Someone who knew he was dying. Someone who had all the right forms prepared and laid out on the table beside him when he died. Someone who was prepared for this eventuality by an extremely anal mother. He's a very interesting case since despite all his preparations, he does not end up where he had hoped. His grave is full and he must be buried just nearby those people he had hoped to spend eternity beside.

Others are less prepared. A transient ends up in a sort of mass grave of unclaimed remains.

Various departments get to showcase their efficiency and thoroughness. We get to see the crematorium. We get to see the bodies in all their grotesquery. Mind you, there are many disturbing images here. I find myself affirmed to make certain arrangements.

The business of death is there. It is always there. To see it at work, churning us into the ground is not something you are likely to want to witness. But somehow it seems important to know just what it is all about.

Under discussion:

The Inspector General  (1949)

I wrote a story a while back about an immortal Egyptian mummy head that Napoleon picks up on his Egyptian campaign. Pretty obscure, just the kind of detail I like. In a book on mummies I picked up a reference that Napoleon had purchased two mummy heads, one for himself, one for Josephine. I thought, well what if they were truly immortal and could talk. What would an ancient Egyptian say to Napoleon and vice versa. Not Danny Kaye material: Napoleon's Mummy Head.

Last night I was watching this movie and low and behold, there's Danny Kaye as an ancient Egyptian head made immortal by Yakov's Golden Elixir. What a bizarre coincidence. 

It seems like a strange conjunction: Gogol and Danny Kaye, but Danny Kaye is great, he's so weirdly expressive. The whole thing is brilliantly energetic. Bizarre and fun. 

Under discussion:

LOL  (2006)

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.

Under discussion:

Khartoum  (1966)

My friend Tom had this one and I was intrigued. 

Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier. 

That's interesting.

Olivier as a Sudanese holy man, off to cleanse the city of Christian influence while terrorizing the middle east as far as Constantinople.  

Wow. Sounds interesting.

 Charleton Heston as a right wing anti-slavery hero in some of the coolest costumes ever fabricated from in the bowels of filmdom.

 Neat. 

Really neat-o sets full of oriental fabrics and more cool uniforms that look just this side of Star Trek.

Rock on. 

And it's a true story.

 Say no more.

 All the same it took me 4 tries to get through it. It's a long one and has all the quirks of a modern production of Shakespeare. 

(the reverence for the facts is a bit too plain to come off as truth. This is propaganda.)

It has ULTRA-PANAVISION.

Listen, It's a yawner period piece, but way cool to look at. So make up your own minds. 

Under discussion:

Death Proof  (2007)

What can I say. I'm a sucker for this. I grew up on those drive-in car movies. Vanishing Point was my favorite film. It's like a spaghetti western in it's set up, it's long slow pans torn apart by speed and flash. Exciting. 

Here is the ultimate scenario for any film lover, the director who'll rewrite your memories for you as a sly nudge and wink. There is the "Driving while bleeding" scene, the custom hood ornament shot, the shoulder squeeze, stunts I know so well, the sex as car crash, the violence as answer. 

In the end, all those movies shared that quality, that violence was the only way to resolve the situation. Whether it's I Spit on Your Grave or Death Race 2000, somehow violence lends a sinister edge to the race.

In a car movie, you fear the crash because of the silence which follows. In car movies, the noise of engines is the stuff of life, all it's rage, it's mania for living.  

I remember Corvette Summer was nearly as cool as Star Wars. I remember that film with William Shatner (or was it Lee Majors?) driving a van in search of fuel in some post apocalyptic California. Driving across the nuclear wastelands. 

I remember Damnation Alley. So many great movies targeted spot on our fears and passions. 

Now it's the stuff of rehash, but there is something so enervating in Tarantino's meta-narrative, that I forgive myself for liking it as much as I do. There must always be this feeling of the little guy rising up and destroying the oppressor. Just so for a moment, we might shrug off our own fears and just shine who we are. 

Exploitation films serve a valuable purpose. They are the antidote to social ills at times just for putting a face to things that go unspoken, unrepresented. 

But all the same, the stunt girl spreads her legs on the hood of a white charger and the the black charger keeps ramming from behind. Holy crap, that's good cinema. 

Under discussion:

Stolen Kisses  (1968)

I suppose I missed the connection when I first saw Four-Eyed Monsters. I don't think it diminishes my opinion of FEM to have recalled that this wasn't completely original. Why not pay homage to Truffaut? I love Truffaut but am only now warming up to the rest of the Antoine Doinel series. I mean, it kind of falls apart. It becomes a wink and a nudge like Ocean's 13. 

But what I keep recalling is the scene in Bed and Board (1970) when, just for an instant, Claude Jade is overpoweringly beautiful. Despite everything that goes wrong for them in their relationship, her beauty is paralyzing.  

Her character is pregnant already, although neither of them know it yet. He asks for the toothpaste, she tosses it to him out the window and gives the thumbs up.

Domestic bliss.

But that frame before the thumbs up is the one that sticks with me.

He can do nothing but love her, despite everything. He is smitten. And just for that audacious moment, so are we. Claude Jade standing in a window. 

Under discussion:

Great World of Sound  (2007)

I'd like to believe that the ambiguity of the ending is a little window for the soul to sneak back in. What life has not been squeezed out, might just flare back in a pregnant pause.

There is something here to disturb everyone I suppose: the sleaze that is the flipside of our consumption, the deceptions we accept from the brokers of our entertainment though we know they are deceptions.

Someone says you are special and a little light goes on in the birdhouse in your soul and just that moment might be worth giving yourself to. What the hell? If all of life is a con and we can only hold our innocence for so long, maybe small moments of glory, however untrue, are all we get. All these people are the same, talents hustling in obscurity. Talent hardly matters. There is just the vigor of the hustle to draw the eye.

The con men always have the best lines. They mean to seduce us. And we fall vicariously into their traps. Would I have caved to that bargain? What is reasonable after all? The engagement itself is false. There is never even a playing field. No critical eye, no true evaluation, no market, nothing to accomplish. The slow and steady grist mill of poor souls. 

Every dream has its demon to feed off the stuff of it. The hoop snake. 

I found this movie to be well paced for what it set out to accomplish. The emotional arc, how the character lost his innocence but never his soul, the sense of human duty and dignity somehow prevailing. I am glad to have come away optimistic from that particular ambiguity. Without it, I would have been disappointed.

The most refreshing new film I've seen in a while. 

Under discussion:

Pickup on South Street  (1953)

Shock Corridor  (1963)

The Steel Helmet  (1951)

I saw this on Netflix on demand thing. Whatever they're calling it. I'm becoming quite a fan of the service although it only works on a tricked out pc. It's pretty cool to have all this stuff at your disposal and although the selection is still slim, there are gems like this: early Sam Fuller.

If you are not a fan of Sam Fuller, you probably haven't seen enough Sam Fuller. This is from a great Criterion Collection of his early films and it has all the tight structure and controversy of Shock Corridor or