Monday, December 31, 2007
Film What I'll remember (maybe) ...
Posted by Pat Graham on Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 12:01 PM
Still scrambling to catch up with the year-end releases—out of the reviewers' loop, I pay my own way, just like y'all—so my annual list of "favorite" movies (not "best," since what do I know about that?) will have to wait till later in the week. But favorite individual scenes/motifs from 2007? Now that's almost doable ...
Up a tree. In Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman's character gets stuck in an old red oak overlooking her family's Long Island seaside property. The symbolism's patent, the character's anxiety palpable—yet considerably more emerges from the physical world itself, in the comfortable pulpy textures of the trunk, the spread of the branches, the beckoning oceanic view: equal parts terror and transport, intimacy and infinity, with a radiant blue envelope of sky and water that seems to go on forever. Something like bliss on a crisp fall day, out on the scary subliminal edge of feeling—except you have to go beyond the literal script to find it. Also another peak moment in the foliage: the mist-shrouded finale of Sharon Lockhart's structuralist, meditative Pine Flat. Is there an actual tree in that billowing murk or only the ghost of same? With so much ambiguous hide-and-seek to puzzle over, it's almost impossible to know.
Passages to India. Benoit Jacquot's The Untouchable has been slagged for its allegedly too touristy, pittoresque scenes of subcontinental misery, and while there's obviously a point to rooting out cultural tin ears, in this case it seems almost completely misplaced. Why shouldn't The Untouchable be touristy? It's offering you a tourist's point of view, in the person of Isild Le Besco's Jeanne, as overawed as she is lost in the "exotic" Bengali undertow, the effects of raw immersion in a putatively "alien" world. I can't think of another film that captures the giddy push-pull of this so seductively, the conflicted urge to plunge ahead without a map, everything simultaneously disorienting and new. That Jacquot shoots it all with incidental "natives" staring into the camera simply adds to the strange confusion, the insinuating sense that our heroine's being constantly observed. For a while she seems even to attract her own stalker: same anonymous orange shirt bobbing in and out of frame; that this small ripple of tension ultimately dissipates doesn't negate the selective paranoia it induces. Runner-up along the Ganges: Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Scream of the Ants—more accusations of tourism, but to me it's an entropic descent, like a full cultural meltdown. Best not go there, just stay wherever you are ...
Trouble in the casbah. Don't you just love the way Julia Stiles's hair swings in one direction as the rest of her goes another during the big "woman in distress" chase sequence in The Bourne Ultimatum? Almost anonymous as she ping-pongs down assorted Tunisian alleyways and corridors, except every so often she'll turn to face the camera full—just so you know it's her, I guess. Almost pure formal abstraction in a film that would rather do away with actors and characters altogether—as well as, arguably, the most interesting thing about it.
Obviously there's more but unfortunately I haven't the time ... so why not fill in the blanks with some examples of your own?
Showing 1-10 of 10
Happy new year, Sir Graham! You just about had me thinking film was a visual medium, but I said three Hail Rosenbaums and it went back to being half-ass lit. I wouldn't say Bourne tried to do away with characters altogether, just hustled to kill off the mortals (represented--sign of the Times--by a journalist) so the gods could play. (Klawans in the Nation noted the striking lack of covertness in this film.) Compare Gone Baby Gone, directed by Bourne's lesser half, which goes out of its way to mortal things up (yeah, I know--poverty chic).
My favorite odd and end of 2007 films was noticing how much the Beadle Bamford character(played by Timothy Spall) in Sweeney Todd - Alan Rickman's toadie - looked like Jonathan Rosenbaum. Having said that Rosenbaum is the *best* critic the Reader has but he still looks like that guy, unfortunately but comically.
I wonder which Sweeney Todd character Pat looks looks like... Pat, I don't recall Pine Flat, where did it play? Do you know if this is coming to DVD?
READER--well, of course i look like helena bonham carter! ... less cleavage, though PINE FLAT played at the film center in april, w/director lockhart in attendance * kinda doubt there'll be any sort of DVD release, but since i haven't an interest in that end of things (the ultimate format junkie, not a DVD player in the house!), i'm hardly in a position to say
I found a lot of favorite moments in Julian Goldberger's "The Hawk is Dying" -- primarily for having such a rich sense of place in places many moviegoers would prefer not to think about (lower-middle-class Florida, auto body shops). Whatever flaws the movie may have had, I was constantly floored by the intimacy and curiosity that Goldberger brought to these spaces. And also, working with autistic adults for a living, I was really impressed by the scenes featuring Michael Pitt, which managed to depict autism compassionately but without eliding the hard reality of it.
FESTUS--sorry i've left you dangling so long ... so: any academy nominations for AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON in the future? * probably not, i guess we can agree on that ... but--back on message--maybe you'll swoon over SWEENEY TODD, the new kabuki burton * filmmaking 101 for the first hour or so, with arbitrary cutting and close-ups camouflaging the "creative" bankruptcy (or at least trying to), but the finale almost redeems the opening slog: pure kobayashi!
No DVD player!?! You poor thing...want one of mine?
READER--thanx but sorry, matter of both principle and inertia ...
"Scream of the Ants"??? It was Moshen's worst film--extremely trite and platitudinous and entirely objectifies Indian subjectivity. Plus--the scoundrels at the Chicago International Film Festival had the gall to screen a reviewers DVD copy with the "Property of..." bug on the screen the whole time!
ABBAS--even if i agreed with you--though i do think SCREAM's more elusive than you're willing to admit (re "objectifies indian subjectivity": assuming i've caught your drift, that's partly what makes it a PERSONAL work; what else would it possibly do?)--my interest isn't so much to defend the film as a whole (or the film fest's presentation of it) as to highlight one particular aspect, what i'm referring to as its "entropic descent" * in that it's following an idea of colasso (re buddhism though, not hinduism), also the jaundiced views of naipaul, albeit without direct intent * and yes, a point of view emerges, or at least a direction of thinking, but it's still fairly inchoate, with plenty loose ends, not something you can neatly confine to a box
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