floatingeye

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THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (1976)

Dir: John Cassavetes

MEDITATIONS ON THE ORIGINAL FACE II

One of the most stimulating relaxations I know is simply floating on water. The good thing in living a short walk from the beach is that I get to do this every other day of nearly half the year. It's great at dusk, whereby the sea is not some abstract volume but the specific sensation of upfloat, and the early moon is that rock over there from me. Tangible moments of world, encompassing what the Chinese call the tao. No film even compares to the feeling, certainly no piffle Koyannisqatsi. But a few filmmakers come close to this totality as something felt. Cinema is nothing in a large sense, that is until a certain point where it becomes a most powerful tool for enlightenment. Cassavetes is one of those guys, and knows just how to use it. So I revisited this after many years as part of my Cassavetes series, this time watching the extended version. The shorter one may be tighter, more focused, but I'll always opt for a longer stay in his world. The film is the perfect summer night movie, one to watch with the distant sound of motor noise flowing through open windows. Cassavetes loves the night, the neon signs, the sound of traffic, the hubbub of the nightclub, the brushing of people in close spaces. The film is full of extremely memorable spaces, years later I could recall Cosmo standing in the entrance of his club, the backalley where he's beaten up, the empty highway, the phonebooth in the middle of nowhere, running from the Chinaman's house. Here, Cassavetes stretches two things. The existential noir where desire, not even so much for poker money, the desire it seems to look comfortable in front of people, summons the noir darkness. Usually in a noir, from that point we get some hallucinative fooling with the narration, here completely merged with the flow of things. The murky proposal for the kill in the cramped car, nothing telegraphed. The subtle menace and helplessness around the gangsters. The foreshadowing bang of the flat tire. The inescapable framing where he was the stooge of fate all along. And a more gentle self-reference, where Cosmo, standing for Cassavetes, gambles with money-people and loses. These mafia executives want from him a straightforward movie that ends with a killing, the simplest stuff, which he grudgingly delivers. The starkest contrast from the fancy, lively improvisation going on in his club, that both reflects and ribs at Cassavetes' own stuff. He does it his way of course, with fumbling, confusion and uncertainty. And still succeeds. Only The Long Goodbye rivals it in the crime sweepstakes of the 70s, no doubt inspired by this. Here, because of the adoption of genre with its clear horizon, the tethers are easier than previous Cassavetes films. Oh there is the anxiety, but that is part and parcel of the greater life. More than any of his films though, it achieves that sublime floating sense that encompasses a concrete totality. His camera excites me like no one else's. Antonioni adopts the transcendent position. Tarkovsky the one of flowing mind. Cassavetes adopts the position of tentative coming-into-being, his visual space has a thick and viscous quality, it has time, it has a tangible and floating gravity, all things coming to be and vanishing again in a cosmic vitality. Cosmo, a man of cosmic vitality. All through the gangster stuff, Cosmo keeps worrying about the show and the club. Because the show and the atmosphere around his club are of the soul of this man, the images and living space worth living for—dreamy and spontaneous, scented air, a little sloppy because it is re-discovered each night. But that is as much a role, the entrepreneur, as that of the killer, the gambler, the suave playboy, masks for the night. Not the original face. Deep down I get the sense of a weary joy that runs deeper than happiness, a mono no aware. Something to meditate upon.

5/5

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THE CHASE (1946)

Dir: Arthur Ripley

DREAMLIKE WOOLRICH, MURKY FILM

In just the first scene the noir schmuck, an ex-GI back from the war, is wistfully looking at a man frying bacon behind a shopwindow, looks down, where —lo— in a sardonic twist of noir fate, he discovers a wallet full of money. Being a straight-up guy, he shows up at the mobster's place in Miami to return it, where he's promptly hired as a driver, falls for the unhappy wife, and elopes with her to Havana, the place of desire. It's a dreamy setup worthy of the most profound noir, but the movie outright fails — the acting is stiff, the romance is forced, the pace is lethargic, the camera is uninteresting. We simply have second- grade talent doing poverty row work for a quick pay. But even botched Woolrich is something, and this one's just so bizarre. The narrator, our GI schmuck, suffers such intense anxiety (possibly related to the war, as often in noir). Midway through the narration breaks down and re-arranges the world. This is preceded by his very own death following a very murky chase through Havana, another deeply noirish twist. Anyway, it turns out that he was never in Havana, though he has the two tickets in his pocket. We have obvious hallucination but the weirdest thing is as follows: 'when' the hallucination starts is undefinable and the ensuing 'real' story picks up from some point in it and culminates in another previously hallucinated moment in Havana. It's strange, because nothing is really done with it. But as clear explication of noir—as with Woolrich's Fear in the Night, almost too clear for my taste—this is straight to the point. Noir Meter: 3/4

3/5

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CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948)

Dir: Henry Hathaway

STUDY: THE TRUE PHOTO

Some movies may not be exceptional in themselves, but still an important part, often in retrospect, of the big picture. This is one. It's really a movie on belief, belief that a man on the street, a newspaper man in our case, a nobler substitute for the noir detective, can get the story right if courageous enough. All you need to know is in the opening and closing scenes. Inbetween, we have merely a solid procedural. A newspaper man, a storyteller, tries to prove a man was convicted wrongly for murder, to do so he needs hard evidence. Various other story-makers stand in his way, cops, DA and governor. But just following the paper- trail is not very interesting. Hathaway was trying to film in that docu-crime mode that was briefly popular at the time, this just means that we don't get the expressive nightmare of noir. We're meant to be placed in real Chicago streets here, to be on a solid ground where truth can be effable and reached with the right effort. And this is interesting. The film opens with the Great Chicago Fire, as much a foundation for the building of modern America as interchangeable gun parts, the modern America which, at the time of the film's release, had transformed itself in the eyes of people to the disorienting urban maze of noir; and the notion that newspapers 'write' history. Both items refer to the constructing of that 'solid ground' of accepted truth. In the end we have this full circle: our man 'writes' history, the right one this time. Legalistic obstacles and cynicism are overcome, the investigation pays off, the crucial photograph (of a newspaper boy no less) when magnified reveals concrete truth. Both the first and the last scene are narrated by an omniscient narrator, the implication is that he is one of the file- keepers on the god level of noir handing down a lifestory. So. Right mind. Right action. Both anchored in belief in the story and human value, ultimately leading to (magnified) photographic truth. And godlike narrator who celebrates the restored order in the universe, praising the everyman's faith and courage. Slight in itself, naive. But how cool if you consider it in light of a specific cinematic trail; in Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart again is looking to confirm not innocence but guilt; another ten years later, in Blowup, the magnified photograph reveals only walls of mind, truth now being ineffable. The next step is yet to be fully taken, though Cache is a bold attempt; even closer look reveals a quantum state of truth. Noir Meter: 2/4

4/5

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FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1947)

Dir: Maxwell Shane

SLIGHT FILM, EXPERT NOIR NOTATION

As I prepare to launch another film noir marathon, I thought I'd get back into groove with something small, offbeat and quickly sketched, but authored by a guy who was one of the preeminent creators of noir: Cornell Woolrich. His Deadline by Dawn would make my list of 10 favorites in the genre, it captures the chimeric noir world on the deepest level. Noir is all about the hallucination, the anxious narration causally tied to the world of the film. This structure is probably more explicit here than in any other noir film, including Lang's: the film starts with the narrator having a nightmare where he kills a woman in a mysterious octagonal room with mirrors, but when he wakes up in his room he finds traces of the murder. Over the course of the film, bit by bit memory seeps back into his narration. A storm leads him back to the fateful house. A cop brother- in-law and his girlfriend act as conscience, escorting him on the journey of atonement. It's all about guilt, memory and mishaps of fate. But the execution is slapdash, the actor doesn't have any tragicool charisma. It's off. But how about this as explication of noir dynamics? What we see and the protagonist experiences in the opening scene as the noir nightmare was very much real, but at the same time illusory for him in the moment of experience—double perspective. And how about this as the deeper cosmic joke of the prankster gods of noir? There would be no problem for our guy if only he didn't wake up that morning with the memory. So it wasn't the killing, but memory that causes stuff—being conscious of the nightmare, it acquires reality. Superb Woolrich. So this is a miss, but right off the bat we have some expert delineation of the noir universe. Noir Meter: 3/4

3/5

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EUROPA REPORT (2013)

Dir: Sebastian Cordero

HOKUS

This is being celebrated among some scifi viewers because it gets the science right, well mostly.. We're at least a hundred years from any such mission, and robots would be the first to probe new environments. Quibbles aside, I am firmly behind a film that uses space as more than an excuse for explosions and empires, the same stuff we have down here, but actually explores what it means to be there. But how about getting right the science of cinematic space? I was watching the Pale Blue Dot photograph for endless minutes the other day, amazing if you can situate the eye to 'feel' being there. That one simple, crude image carries so much more power than the more spectacular renderings of graphics artists: for one reason only, the vastness of real space leading to the eye. So ideally in a movie like this, every tool must be calibrated to beam us to a real space. They got it wrong here for my taste. Specifically, the filmmakers don't know how to use the 'found footage' mode: the whole reason of using this quick short-hand is that it allows you to heighten our placement in narrative space and time, establishing a concrete moment. But they ruin this, utterly ruin, by splicing in the flow interviews with talking heads from outside the timeline, and all sorts of cute editing effects, multicamera screens and so on that could not be of the moment. This ruins time. On matters of cinematic space, we'd need a concrete architecture of orientation: vivid placement of where the ship is, what extends outside, where astronauts are going to work on the wing, etc. Everything that 2001 gets so right. Don't think I am using the Kubrick film to belittle this in some way; it's just underlying mechanics of space. These are a mess here. How does the Russian grouch who's fixing something on the orbiter find himself back in the landing scuttle with the rest? Puzzling. A single moment best illustrates the failures in the handling of both space and time. A solar flare causes equipment to malfunction at one point, a usual contrivance so we can have some mechanical tension as they run to fix things. My point is that we're meant to be on one of Jupiter's moons, wholly invested in the mission, the discovery of new worlds. And we actually see the solar flare!

2/5

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WALDEN - DIARIES NOTES AND SKETCHES (1969)

Dir: Jonas Mekas

MATHEMATIZATION

Aptly titled, this is a series of visual sketches by Jonas Mekas, trips he had, parties he went to, friends he had over for coffee, a circus he visited, a wedding he attended, strolls around 42nd Street, anti-war demonstrations, breakfasts he shared with a cat. The point? Celebrating all the things that pass from the eyes, the fleeting rush of remembered life. You should know that he was from that time and scene that allowed him to know Warhol, Ginsberg, Brakhage and the Velvet Underground, all of whom appear in the film. So the exercise probably had its own cultural gravity at a time when all sorts of solid beliefs were challenged, down to how we perceive reality and what constitutes art and meaning Cool aside. The same year Mekas began filming this, the physicist Bell released his famous refutation of Einstein's 'hidden variables' theory which, Einstein had proposed, should when revealed concretely determine all the perceived craziness that happens in the quantum world. No such thing, Bell showed. The world in the microscopic level is wonderfully bizarre, entangled in spatial simultaneity, realized in observation. The philosophical framework goes back to the 20s and before, and so it is with the cinematic framework: silent city symphonies, Dziga Vertov and others were doing this. The eye creates the world. Like then, there's only a succession of lived events here, inseparable from consciousness. Like Vertov and others, flows are captured so the eye can have something to slice; the whole thing is burrowed with rapidfire editing, jerky camera, jumps, whirls and eddies in cinematic space. Well okay, that may be the framework. Did I like it though? Even finding here some of the most marvelous editing ever in a film, even thinking there are a myriad striking images, even admiring the working ethos, dissonant eye and diaristic format, the answer is still no. Whereas Vertov was building on rhythm, Mekas is completely atonal and jerky, a natural progression one could argue. Vertov had a symphonic purpose, a building to. Even so, he could be tiresome. Mekas has no such thing in mind. I'll have you imagine the film as someone turning on the faucet of a gardening hose and moving the hose around, the gushing stream is clear images, there is no noticeable dramatic touch-up anywhere, but the very motion is turbulent, a fluid and not concrete event. So far, I'm firmly behind the exercise. Simply on a moment-by-moment basis it is marvelous, the film is a vast reservoir of layered image. Whole segments were at the same time unwatchable for me, strictly physically speaking. But my big complaint is that in the long run, it achieves no deep value. It is the materialistic opposite extreme of idealized classic Hollywood, nothing but form and the objects. Warhol, a superficial dandy, would take this to extremes in his Empire, set-up for him by Mekas himself. Oh we catch glimpses of human connection, they're unavoidably embedded in the images. There is a rich tapestry of glimpses and spaces. But life, the pulsing life of being made conscious of others and things, ultimately is about how the objects being 'in' awareness color the eye, how a loved one can relax your time or lighten up a room, this having its quantic sense. Here, we have constant transformations in the eye but none of it springs from being-made-conscious of valued facts, it's all been applied mechanically after the fact (quite literally) in pretty much the same way. It happens not to any (hypothetical) self in the film, but around a camera. We can metaphorically speak of quantum images, but there is complete disorganization here, none of the mysterious connections. Weird complaint for Mekas maybe. But I can see why Tarkovsky famously objected to films of this sort, I think Brakhage in particular. Tarkovsky did not use to film ordinary life, but patiently sculpted a rich consciousness. Cassavetes was even more gruesome in his materialism than Mekas, but the larger point was creating a flow of consciousness, transcendent in mind. That is always the great gamble. On the other hand, this strikes me, let's say, as a mathematization of cinematic nature, an abstract tool awaiting application in lived situations. Budding filmmakers need to have this in their creative life, even if it's for the most part empty technique.

3/5

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REMINISCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA (1972)

Dir: Jonas Mekas

ARTIFICIAL INTRUSIONS INTO LIFE

This is too distanced to connect to me. Here's the gist. Mekas returns to his homeland of Lithuania after so long, visits his old mother and old friends from school. Some things have changed, others have stayed the same, the way it always is. He follows his old mother around trying to capture, from his end, an ordinary day: the sitting and walking, the work. Primarily, the problem is that for Mekas the images are intimate and familiar, emotionally charged, had to be since he is revisiting childhood here. But this is conveyed in a casual, almost indifferent way, a New York artist's way which is what Mekas was at this point. We experience this all in the same desultory way, from a filmic distance. We only see him once in the film before the camera, and that is a cold image where he simply feeds logs to a fire where his mother cooks pancakes. Maybe there's a Lithuanian element here that I'm not able to reach. So I don't get the deep experience of the return, I get a diaristic snapshot of Lithuanian life. I don't see the returning son here, only the formal filmmaker. It's cold, without embrace. Mekas had a famous falling out with Cassavetes in the early days, for reasons of narrative form in Shadows. I can only imagine the warmth and ragged truth of the film Cassavetes, a Greek, would have made about his return to the place of childhood. This is interestingly reflected in the film here. Mekas is returning with his camera, looking to capture a slice of remembered life and contrasts. What happens all through the film is that people in spite of his efforts awkwardly arrange themselves to be filmed: they sing around the camera, his cousin's family poses for a photo. The very presence of the artificial eye creates artifice, disrupts the living flow. Cool tidbit: we see at one point Wittgenstein's house in Vienna, the one designed by him. It's an ugly, cold, square thing, fittingly for a logician. Austrians are thinkers, taxonomists in the big dance of things, and Mekas, if nothing else, wants to film outside the logical box. The film ends with images of Vienna in flames, a fruit market burning, because, Mekas muses, the city doesn't want it, it wants to clear room for something modern.

2/5

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2 FAST 2 FURIOUS (2003)

Dir: John Singleton

2 FAKE

I like most of the Fast & Furious stuff to varying degrees, for some expert mechanics in the camera and nothing more. Once Vin Diesel came back on board, the stories 'matured' to just generic crime stuff, losing the youthful world, on the other hand the mechanical execution improved. This is poor in the usual, expected ways, it is intended for a teenage audience so the dynamics reflect a teenage understanding of how things work. You'll see that in just the opening race, where no one is older than 25, the race takes place through empty streets, with no actual life anywhere. Miraculously how, kids have bust into the control room of a lifting bridge which they lift to spice up the race, just like that. And in the end the parent-cops show up to break off the party. In the end, who cares about a stupid plot with a drug kingpin? I'd love to see a film like this that just revels in the hyper world of mindless chrome, girls, music and engine roar, a Spring Breakers of cars that didn't sugarcoat the danger to soul. Tokyo Drift came close, but again no. But what really kills this, all else conceded, is how devastatingly poor is the racing action. It would vastly improve in the next one, and over time, as the special effects, editing and production design teams would gradually change. But here the maker and his team embarrass themselves. The motion detail, backgrounds, impacts, and virtual camera in the driving are on a Power Rangers level. Nearly all of them were replaced for Tokyo Drift, for good reason. This is the Batman and Robin of the franchise, lame from start to finish, and coming so early it's a miracle it didn't kill it off.

1/5

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A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974)

Dir: John Cassavetes

MEDITATIONS ON THE ORIGINAL FACE

With this, Cassavetes joins my list of cinematic masters who evoke a transcendent humanity, next to maybe six more. This is rare praise from me. The man cuts deep, and in progressively deeper ways which I'm going to note here, extending a discussion that began in previous comments. The easy thing to say is that it's an emotionally shattering movie, as visceral as any of the films on madness, better in fact. There had been many good films in this niche prior of course. If you want detailed visual metaphor for the woman's situation, you'll find a great set in Red Desert. A more angsty one in Through Glass Darkly, together with harrowing emotion and Protestant guilt. Repulsion has the more eye- grabbing hallucination. Then of course is what many reviewers mention when talking about Cassavetes. Usually dubbed as realism, it is the lasting impact of lived experience, the intense focus on the moment-at-hand. You live through a Cassavetes film and all that. Work for some, transcendent for others. But you can read about that elsewhere, here I want to leverage a somewhat different set of notions which I think reveal a deeper genius at play. The Cassavetes effect is something I have not encountered anywhere else. See, it is not just the tethering to moment or the undefined horizon. Ozu had done this, Antonioni and others. Altman was trying at this time. Marienbad was fully an evocation of trying to define horizons. A small advance in what Cassavetes does is an extreme fixation to moment. Remarkable in itself, but in the long stretch it would achieve nothing but nihilism. Buddhists, whose main area of expertise is exactly an awareness of emptiness, what is usually transferred in the West as 'being in the moment', caution against single-minded fixation on fixation. It's one of the most tiresome things I know in my own meditation, trying to be in the moment. Cassavetes is similarly exhaustive up until a point. Confining our gaze may prove so suffocating some viewers will want out, that's the gamble: the reward can only be apparent in retrospect. During my first watch of Husbands, I was exasperated and ready to write him off, that is until a certain point. But it matters that we work to stay tethered to that moment-at-hand, mirroring the husband's commitment to his loved one, the commitment to departing friends in Husbands, to forging a relationship in Minnie and so on. It matters that we stay in that space, investing of ourselves. Within that space is the lovely Rowlands, as much an auteur in that space as Cassavetes is of the overall film. Her performance here tops any of Brando's in improvised creation of the situations. Without a horizon herself, Cassavetes would famously refuse directions during the shoot, she throws herself in aching, innocent, calligraphic madness. It is the shyness of wanting to please and be a part of others but not knowing which parts of you to bare in what time, the most touching ordeal. An actress unsure of the extent of her performance. Implicitly, she seems to know the scenes with music (starting with the black coworker who breaks into tenor song over dinner) are partly hallucinated by her character, and knows they are not necessarily not happening. Hence, the confusion and hesitated reaction. And then she goes away. This is where the movie starts, very slowly. So far it has all been preparation, fixing the mind for meditation. As in previous films, this narrative shift creates desire, lack, expectation, human horizon. In Husbands it was the trip to London, in Minnie the proposal. It's a masterful effect at work, so risky because he leaves it completely up to the viewer to stay tethered. Masterful because it asks of us to discover the character as her close ones have known her since before everything, before the anger, confusion and labels—not mad, wife or mother, just the sweet face you've tied your life to. Now we want to see her back, see how she is, like her husband and children do. And because we haven't had any distractions leading up to the shift, no subplots, music, montage or visual flow to break the concentration, it registers in a tremendous way. Lesser films would discuss memory, here we're made to have memories—but if and only if we have been patient in the knowing. I haven't seen anything like this until the recent crop of Asian films like 2046 and Syndromes and a Century, and there without one tenth of the livingness achieved here. Is that how it ends though? No, and here is the deeper genius for me. This may be the most heartwarming film I've seen for just the last scene, a wholly new glimpse as the couple tidy up their place, alone at last, safe, calm in each other's presence. And then it ends. Another shift and horizon, this time to who these people are away from all the public crap of life. And how poignant? Love as quietly taking care of the same house together. As in previous films, we have presence in the moment, presence over time, the shift to horizon, and second shift in the end. Fixing the mind to one place then releasing so you hover over the world, awareness rippling outwards. This may be the closest to meditation any filmmaker has come, and I'm usually a stickler about this. Oh, it remains work, but the cumulative world built over the course of several films has never been equaled in cinema for my taste. Something to meditate upon.

5/5

[floatingeye]

OBLIVION (2013)

Dir: Joseph Kosinski

BATTLEFIELD EARTH IS FEELING LESS LONELY

The only good news here is that sometimes a movie can do everything so wrong it becomes as revealing about what works in a film as one by a master. In just the awful expositional slab of voice-over monologue, we find out that aliens exist and have destroyed the moon, the Earth is an uninhabited wasteland, humanity lives in Saturn, and our protagonist has had his memory wiped off. This is just indicative of the overall mess that follows. The film is a hodge podge of seemingly every sci-fi movie made in the past 50 years. Individual moments recall everything from Dune to Riddick to The Matrix to 2001, but the main effect is closer to Battlefield Earth. Overall the effect it has on me is like watching a kid create a story and world around his toys. He looks immersed setting up who did what, but it's all a framework for bumping noises. I'm illustrating this in three areas, though the film is bad from start to finish. In the connecting logic: an enterprise with an estimable cost in the trillions is operated by two people on the ground, so far as they know anyway. One of them flies around repairing things, by himself. During a crisis, with a hydrogen plant in flames after sabotage and one of the drones missing, he takes off to relax in a cabin in the woods. Basically everything about the mission makes as much sense as Planet of the Vampires. Later some of this is reconstituted by an even dumber twist. In the emotional gravity: our hero's love of his life is shot at one point and dying. How is this dealt in the film? Simple, Cruise flies off to another station, sneaks in, picks up medicine and flies out to her again in time to save her, in essence reversing fate. The gravest action is rolled back without consequence, removing any weight of subsequent grave happenings. In the cinematic gravity: in good action films, when things crash or explode we feel this by having the camera tethered to the forces. Watch the scene where Cruise is chased by the drones—the motion and impacts are poor, the situating of our eye is as dopey as rear-projection in its time. The environments are mediocre throughout. This is the biggest failure, because even the dumbest action film can excite if we are placed the right way. Something else. A movie steeped in technology recasts technology, in the gnostic trope usual in sci-fi, as the crazed demigod in the sky sucking up the planet's energy, imprisoning the self. Peace is equated with nature and playing old records, after one has sacrificed himself in the 'temple of his gods', dying what in Walt Whitman's time was called a 'good death'. Since then, the concept has gone from Yankee Protestantism to Salafi Jihadism, you'd think bringing into crisper focus the absurdity of it, but no. Mentioning these as more indications of the short-sightedness here.

1/5

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ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn

NON-EMPTINESS

In theory, I should like a film like this; dark, slow, abstract unfolding of emptiness. Alas, it's this guy again. What Refn does is that he rummages through the same heap of bloody comic- books as Tarantino, only he elongates the panels and slows the narrative time and wit. Whereas a Tarantino movie is like the man you see in interviews, bursting with sloppy wit, Refn is ceremonious and important: slow. Whereas QT likes Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Refn likes Aguirre. To that effect he chooses mute grunts as protagonists that allow him to pass the slow-wittedness as meditations on violence. Whether or not you'll like this will boil down to a preference for dense atmospheres and archetypal story steps. As for me it's not cinema I care about. It's a matter of the formative emptiness at play: in a film like this the idea is to slow the narrative time so we can observe with more nuance. We have this shift to a purer view, in good hands anyway, not so that we stop observing altogether and bask in some inert quietude, but so we can observe closer to the source. That is the point of actual meditation by the way. The film here clears a lot of room and slows the time so we can have a clearer echo of soul, and does this moderately well, Refn is dependable with colors and sound. The abstraction is ordinary, with the only novelty the application to genre. A revenge movie with the usual confrontation established in the far narrative horizon. That's not an issue. It's just that the observation in those spans of slowed time is stale and juvenile: Biblical father in the punishing cop, symbolic castration. The effect it has on me is like walking through an art gallery and being told a painted vase stands for beauty and how this is profound, whereas outside the window are actual gardens and further yet a city with its life that goes unexplored while I'm forced to sit through posturing. I have no use for something that simply aims to numb and you should question why you do in yours. It's not that it's so bold and inaccessible, precisely the opposite, it has little to offer. At least with a filmmaker like Tarr, I get the sense of a genuine and awesome cosmogony of despair. This is 'rad' teenage nihilism.

2/5

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LIQUID SKY (1982)

Dir: Slava Tsukerman

80′s GLAM BLONDIE GOES BOATING

Here's another one for my list of great 80s cult movies, one I will remember as fondly as Repo Man, Blue Velvet and Videodrome. The vision is maybe less accomplished but as vibrant as those films, basically what we get at first glance is something between Daisies (the Czech film) and a Yugoslav film I recently discovered called W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism, with many of the same preoccupations— youth, feminism, freedom of expression, attitudes to sex, contrasted with repressive mores in men and sex. The obvious metaphor used here is aliens (as in a flying saucer lands in New york) for the emerging glam punk scene with its androgynous Bowie sex-image and post-Factory and Warhol scene with its drugs and ersatz madness as style. AIDS had officially entered the lexicon the year before, this is reflected in the film as the men evaporating when they achieve an orgasm with our 'alien' heroine. The whole worldview behind this is what you can expect from the 80s. Rejection, solipsism, a general detachment from anything that does not please a sense of escape and fulfillment now, a numbed attitude I normally find vacant. Usually mistaken as Zen, it seems to attach itself to American youth every decade or so since the mods. And yet the dignified assertion of individuality in the face of small-mindedness and abuse shows a still sparkling soul—the girl casually invites to her place a stranger from the club because he promised cocaine, and seems surprised and mildly disgusted that he lied and basically expected sex. Three women are finding out the men in their lives are not worth it, the junkie boyfriend is more interested in his own pleasures, the German in his science of 'observing'. The young model, who exists with more freedom outside the norm, unconsciously removes them from the story. In the end, this synthetic avatar of freedom and unconventionality is consumed and magically disappears in the night as the two women watch. In its nested layering of created situations where a woman explores by allowing fragmented selves to be explored, this is situated close to two of my favorite movies of all time, another Eastern European film called Loves of A Blonde, and Celine and Julie. It's an 80s take on dreamy flight. It's all here so lovely and heartfelt about the overall world, with its heady cocktail of now innocent strangeness and still evocative flicker in the eye. The New York penthouse at night, with its open balcony to gleaming skyscrapers is one of the most vital spaces in any film I know. The cool, composed rejection of fixed roles and images, tuning out minus the constructed cosmology of world-renewal of a decade earlier. The painted faces of models casually desperate to be captured against the gleaming skyscraper-void, stating nothing beyond the flickering moment of things coming to be. The parting shot with our heroine lost in her dervish spin in the dark, a dreamy incarnation that couldn't last.

4/5

[floatingeye]

MS .45 (1981)

Dir: Abel Ferrara

EPILEPTIC DREAM OF THE BANSHEE

This goes straight in my list of great cult items. The good news is that it's not just great exploitation, it's an intriguing little thing in general. It's all about sensuality of course. The famous poster announces as much upfront. A mute young girl is raped, in one of those mad exploitive strokes twice the same day, freaks out and goes on a killing spree around New York. But the whole thing has less to do with Death Wish with its implacable morality and more with something like Taxi Driver or Carrie, situated closer to the eye than the world. The metaphor used to convey this, a wonderful one, seen in the opening scene where she models a dress for a buyer, is that when she moves the material seems to flow around her. So we are tethered to her as she moves through the world, ripping the seams. Things flow around her, mostly lusting men. A street hoodlum chases her. A photographer invites her to his studio for pictures. A Saudi oil sheik picks her up in a limo. In a bizarre scene, she executes four or five gangbangers one of whom has nunchucks! Her boss is really kind with her but he obviously wants more. It's all a bit unreal seen through her eyes, many hazy shots and fades. And it's all kept in a simple comic-book style, not as we know the term now but as it was meant before the movie craze and big dumb stuff like Tomb Raider, a quick sketch. The climax is astonishingly effective; it happens in a Halloween party so we can have this unusual fabric of disguised men and charged atmosphere, herself dressed as a sexy nun and just tears everything, slowing the time into epileptic strobe, heightening images, the most startling of those being a man dressed as a bride who as she kills, the veil and wig fall of his head and hang on a door, severing as it were the purer image from the taint. Ferrara would extend a few of these notions in his more ambitious Blackout, but this is probably better.

4/5

[floatingeye]

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ (1971)

Dir: John Cassavetes

TRANSCENDENTAL JAZZ AGAINST THE VOID II

Step the third in my journey through Cassavetes.. Here, he takes one of the most popular movie formats, the romance. Boy- meets-girl in LA, under the lights. But she is no cool femme fatale, she is fragile, unsure of herself. He is no Bogie himself; as the film starts he is watching The Maltese Falcon in a theater, a scene where Mary Astor throws herself crying on Bogie's feet. Trying to pick up women afterwards, he's chased out of bars, looked at as a weirdo and beaten up in an alley. The idea is that we are not going to see movie people, but real people on the street. That was the ambition anyway, a situation aggravated by Cassavetes' actorly Studio background—as in Husbands, we have constant shouting matches, awkward intrusions, obnoxious pulling and nervousness. He seems to think the room inhabited by these characters won't feel real and lived, unless we have damage on the walls, a Greek sensibility, after all the main story recasts Zorba. So unlike a Bogart film, the actors here don't coolly glide off each other, they cut themselves on each other's edges. The same situation develops here as I described in my comment on Husbands. The edges, the damage are unusually pronounced, by this I mean a situation like when Moskowitz almost runs her over with his truck to get her to go with him takes me out of it. A softer next moment will pull me in again, until the next hysteric one and so on. Which brings me to my main discussion about presence. Moskowitz is the kind of character who can be likable once you get to know him, the sort of bond you form with coworkers that greatly depends on shared time. Minnie is warm when we first see her, but there's a haughty, nervous ghost in her. It is, let's say, a truer to life perception than the immediately charming Bogarts and Stanwycks of old. It requires work to take them in, giving space. That narrative room, that space where characters wreck themselves and things works the same way once you excise the shouty moments, simply wonderful. None of the individual visual moments are cool or typically beautiful. The locales are drab and mundane. The light and textures all natural, the whole is imperfect but breathes. In this, he equals Pasolini, another master of the living eye. So on a moment-by- moment basis, the space is like the characters, intensely present flow to undefined horizon. In a movie like the Maltese Falcon, the narrative horizon is immediately defined (get the bird), and again defined in every scene (get out of there, rough someone up, etc.) so we are at all times comfortably tethered, enjoying the play. What Cassavetes does matters in the long run in the sculpting of the overall effect, it doesn't leap to attention. Like Husbands, this slowly starts to work for me once I have a narrative shift that faintly, very faintly defines a certain horizon in the story—here marriage. Cassavetes is work, because this happens so late in the movie, the bulk of it is like staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration, or waiting for musicians to tune their instruments. Here, that shift happens about 9/10ths in the film, and then we're through that and a new horizon opens, the closing shots of family life and then it's over. So it starts to work late but extends for me to long after it's over, it's one of the most haunting effects I know, transcendentally marvelous; but more on that in the next comment on Woman.

4/5

[floatingeye]

THROW MOMMA FROM THE TRAIN (1987)

Dir: Danny DeVito

“THE NIGHT IS SULTRY”

This is fun and cerebral, which is more than can be said about most comedies then or now. I don't know who to credit as the main voice behind the film, but it shows a confluence of talent that work with each other well and care to craft something vibrant with some intelligence. I'll have you imagine it as something between Rob Reiner (who produces here) and the Coens. Two writers faced with writer's block may be creating each the other's storyworld. This parallel flow is hammered early in the film with the symmetric shots of writers on their desks, puzzling about a story. Both are faced with an impossible living situation, both are hampered in their creative endeavor by a similar strain. One is a college professor, his block is largely mental, ego- recurring thoughts of his wife. The other is an unrefined simpleton who is still living with his momma, his block is this nasty woman and it manifests physically with slaps and abuse. We begin and end with the more complicated writer finishing up on the book we just 'saw'. A tad simpler and we'd be close to Princess Bride, harmless nested fiction for the pleasure of a world outside the norm. A tad more intricate and it'd be a sibling film of Raising Arizona, a dream complicated in the dreaming, with every cartoonish situation a bit blacker. DeVito's humorous omnipresence is great.

3/5

[floatingeye]

HUSBANDS (1970)

Dir: John Cassavetes

TRANSCENDENTAL JAZZ AGAINST THE VOID

Here, I continue with Cassavetes and my look at presence and jazz time. I think this can only work when you see it a second time. I have to feel like I know these people as well and deep as they know each other. And know them long enough for their quirks and peculiarities to stop annoying and become part of the damaged self I embrace in the life and time that we've seen go together. In fact, I think the film is structured in two halves for a reason, the first half so we can know them at some length, and the real film is the second half once they land in London. The idea? A fourth friend has died as the film begins, but death, how we treat death, is a formal, symbolic rite empty of life. And they can't go back to their wives, that'd be the same as every other day. It can't be either the formal or everyday time, it has to be a moment extended in time with a bit more clarity. Here we're looking to have transcendent insight. So they basically go out because that is the only way. They get drunk, sing with others, snigger and run in the streets, tease and grab and abuse each other and strangers. As I got to know them, they were all three annoying to me. Jackasses. They're not cute, nor noble, nor particularly idealistic or smart about anything; this isn't a Woody Allen film. They're not even your average guy on the street, if such a thing exists. Here's where Cassavetes' limitations kick in and the film all but loses me. He was an actor first, grew up artistically in the Actors Studio. We know the school as going for a natural embodying of character after Brando and the likes, but its actual roots are Soviet and go back to constructing room around a self. A Studio actor's job is to go into that room and toss the furniture, tear at the walls a bit. What we see here are three actors, all very good ones, all lovable in other projects, deeply immersed in trying to construct the fact they are not acting. They are, we can tell. It's an alienating effect, because they expect us to not know it's feigned. We want to not know, because that would be tearing through their craft, but the scaffold is all there. They mechanically repeat lines and pause for effect, they act manic and loud all the time, they come up with artificial small talk and repetition; it's all a bit off, calling attention to the eccentric, actorly tearing of wallpaper. If that were all, I'd rate this low, there's just nothing particularly useful to me about this ideal of realism. I'd much rather have nonactors. But there is something else— let's say time and consciousness. It's not different in tone once they reach London, but something happens. We already know them. Now we know them as other people are getting to know them, mostly girls. We know them as friends know each other in a crowd. It's a strange and slow effect at work, because it works against what we knew of them so far—away from home, they're a bit more lonely and desperate. Is the zest of connection more real now, next to strangers? Strangely, it begins to work and that changes everything. We have memories of having spent time. Look, many great works are this way, split in two parts which are time and present consciousness of that time —Lolita, Vertigo, Mulholland Dr. Time is never a lone abstract, there is no yesterday outside where you were doing what you were doing. It is rooted in space and self so we conjure all three in memory, we always do. It is a film about the memory of departed friends, but it's all in the fabric of our experience. It plays against a larger void, the one where eager, mysterious London girls come from, there they are in the room and gone again. The transcendent insight is, of course, that there is only now and the place you are, but that space of mind is always loaded with the consciousness of having known everything else, jazz time in constant improvisation. It's a strange and difficult experience, because as in life, the larger point becomes apparent in reflection. It may be a film that'll stay with me for a long time, getting better in memory. But is it an important cinematic step? Of course!

4/5

[floatingeye]

FAST & FURIOUS (2009)

Dir: Justin Lin

CRIME AND FANTASY

Tokyo Drift was all about the flashy driftworld of youthful fantasy, rooted in sex, rooted in finding the necessary ego. It could have been something, if only the story ropes weren't tossed without passion or curiosity to bring back something more than mass and noise. This is something else. Cars are, of course, central again. The women and exotic locales, this time the Dominican Republic and Mexico. Vin Diesel is back, so we get heroics of a more action-y nature, guns and kicking. We get revenge as a main narrative engine and the Feds on the trail of a dangerous drug-lord from Mexico, which do even less to distinguish the film from the bulk of crime action films. The film is generic crime, only more unrealistic. It makes a real difference, however, if you can put aside the absence of what you pretty much knew was not going to be there in the first place, it means you aren't bothered that it's not playing your favorite Debussy at the r'n'b pool-party. The party can still be a helluva time. It's all about the gravity of speed and crashing things for me, extended to eye consciousness. This is a more elaborate notion of realism that I'm talking about, I mean the stunts themselves are unbelievable if you pause to think of what you just saw, it plainly defies physics. It's all about gravity in the eye. The first scene is characteristic of this, our team is hijacking a gas truck en route, one is up on the truck breaking off the wagons which have been hitched to another truck running in reverse which then can speed off with the payload. We are so beyond physics here, that at one point the (unmanned) truck swerves seemingly by itself, metaphysically, to hit our guy's car. It works. Unstoppable is the pinnacle of this mechanized eye craft because it 'looks' to both story metaphor and inner urges, but this is pretty damn good for just the excitement it generates, the splintered image. The story is crisp and compact, moves fast sketching a world with simple mechanics. It's only the narrative support so cars can whizz by, screech, swerve, and bump into things. The camera similarly spins, whirls and shoots by, flying shards slicing our sight. The template for the car fantasy is, naturally, The French Connection.

3/5