Hola / Adios

Even Cowgirls get the Blues (The Good Girl, 2002)

2012-01-29T13:03:00.000-08:00

Miguel Arteta gave us in the year 2000 the polemical and funny Chuck & Buck, written by Mike White. In which, a very creepy individual, Buck O'Brien (Mike White), comes out of nowhere to stock his childhood friend Charlie "Chuck" Sitter (Chris Weitz) many years later as if they where still little kids. From being a very small independent production it jumped into mainstream making a loud noise, I think it's huge success had to do with the way that homosexuality was exploited. The film is grotesque and jarring at the same time that it's sweet and close to the heart. Cinematically, Arteta built a labyrinth of physical spaces that resonate deeply in the characters psychology and in ours. Our intellect doesn't know how to react to certain story points but we don't stop feeling, so the film is very powerful. In the year 2002 Arteta directed again a Mike White's screenplay, The Good Girl. A great opportunity for Jennifer Aniston to liberate herself from being the eternal Rachel Green from the sitcom Friends; Arteta again confirms his talent to move us in different ways that the movies do using the same tools. Justine (Aniston) is bored, working in convenience store in middle of nowhere, with a husband who's biggest ambition is to smoke a joint with his best friend everyday after painting a house. Justine, describes herself as someone who had a perfect life being a child and in a moment when she turned and see there was nothing. One day turning while working, she met Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal). Both are trapped in a childhood that hasn't found the space to mature, to grow up, they start an affair. But is late for Holden who's already lost in the literary fantasies that he has used to survive until then, and also to late for Justine who's reality holds her tight without a possible escape.It's impressive how economically Arteta works, he builds everything from simple things. Extremely basic shots, even shooting for 30 days, and how effective are his results; powerful minimalism with just the correct notions. For example the fact that Jennifer Aniston is cast as Justine, a character that explores her sexuality for the first time, as the actress is exploring it now in the screen in the same way. You are talking about an American sweetheart being part of corky sexual intercourses, and the film continues to be naive, sweet, never grotesque. So again our feeling are affected in strange ways, the film definitely moves us. Justine reacts to problems as we never would imagine she would, but it makes sense, just on the limits of almost not, in those limits we feel in different ways. I heard somewhere that Justine was in the mind of Arteta a modern Madame Bovary, her name is one of Sade's most famous heroins, but the funny part is how in this society a character like that has to adapt to survive, she simply doesn't fit. Fitting with this all new notions that she acquired is what makes the last part of the film so inhumanly warm.Arteta hasn't stopped taking about how the way we treat kids, how we build worlds that don´t exist for them, makes them unhappy later. How do we build unmovable walls that they will never move, thinking that those are real walls, never being able to come out to play.

REST IN PEACE THEO

2012-01-28T23:41:00.000-08:00

Rear Window (45m2)

2011-11-19T12:35:00.001-08:00

45m2 (Stratos Tzitzis, 2010) it's only the confirmation that something big is going on in Greek cinema today, you can even see it with a normal movie that's only looking for a normal audience. Hristina (Efi Logginou) is tired of her situation, she can't stand living with mom at the same time that her boyfriend is living with his parents, and working selling bags half time is not what she has in mind for the perfect job. So one day she tries to change it; she ends her relationship and rents an apartment by herself, although she doesn't have enough money to do it. Even cigarette money counts, so she stops smoking. She sleeps almost on the floor, just a mattress lies in between, but there are other things in between like her search for freedom that starts giving her a way of life; she starts moving boxes around property of the person who use to live there before and starts to use them as furniture with some personal style. One day she can't stop her curiosity and she starts to look for the boxes' content, like Pandora; but instead of ruin she finds love. An artist used to live in her present space, an artist that has what she's searching for. He starts existing in a notebooks, then in words that kept living inside her long after reading, coming to form her new reality, until finally those words get out to the city walls; indirectly he teaches Hristina that there's no border for the soul. We only need to be that soul that we are already, outside our mind; we just need to feel and stop thinking. Maybe stop thinking with our brains but with our heart, at least with our guts to start from somewhere I guess. Thank you very much for your simplicity Mr. Startos (nice name though, makes me imagine a cloud). With a neutral usage of camera and montage, we follow Hristina around trying to cope with life in terms that she finds as her own. She's learning, living, feeling, and falling in love with freedom without even understanding it.

The Weight of the Moon (Hanezu, 2011)

2011-11-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

Hanezu (Naomi Kawase, 2011) is based on a very old haiku about a love triangle that ends up in a metaphysical threesome between three mountains. In Mexico, it doesn't sound that weird; we can understand those themes thanks to our old Aztec inheritance, we've been listening about legends of the mountains that surround Mexico City that still in love don't stop looking at each others snow on top of their earthly cloth. In the movie a woman lives happily in couple, when she meets a strong and sensible (she can almost taste him in his cooking) sculptor. Surprisingly we don't sense the infidelity until almost an hour of film has passed, remember that the picture is directed by a very subtle and elegant Japanese woman; and you can just feel it but never know it for sure. Naomi Kawase's aura is registered in particular places during the narration (declamation): a huge moon flies over the hill to dive into the dark clouds of the night, some birds build a nest inside the room where the characters start their affair, the water receives the natural red tint from the woman's hands, the cloth with a new color hangs from the wind. Although the perfect balance between naturalism and the lyrical metaphor that we could enjoy in The Mourning Forest (Kawase, 2007) is broken, the camera of Kawase is still finding certain realities that can affect us in many ways. The balance was broken because the metaphor won over reality forgetting about cinema's nature; Pasolini comes to mind. It was more important to justify the legend with the red of the blood in a bathtub that echoes the taint in her art, than really working a screenplay that justified human relations; it was more important the past than the present. But let me tell you that those insects roaming the mud of the cave of the night with the sound of the voice over will continue to walk in my perception for a while; we can't be less than thankful for a bunch of images that Kawase (who came to Mexico to present her visual poem) gave us, triggering a thousand more inside of us. Images of our past, even if we didn't experience it ourselves with this body.

Far and Away (The Mourning Forest, 2007)

2011-06-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

I just end up watching The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase, 2007) which I really liked because it takes you by surprise. In the beginning we see Machiko (Machiko Ono) entering to work as a nurse in a country side nursing home, she starts a relationship with the old Shigeki (Shigeki Uda) that seems will be the stereotypical I help you and you will help me and we'll be alright at the end, I can leave the nursing home with a smile and credits roll. Nothing like this happens, we are in a film by a humanist that doesn't care about telling a story. Every minute we get further into the forest, away from the nursing home representing the world of commodities, into a green ocean of a fantastic soundtrack that just puts you out of your body.
The virtuous Kawase uses her documentary learned abilities to empower a drama with ultra realistic qualities, in the detail and in the whole aspect. You can see hints of this activities in the names of the characters and the names of the actors, or the way that the magnificent light and camera positions of Hideyo Nakano work with certain acting directing. In the other hand Kawase is very rigid with certain production design decisions of fictional cinema that considerably raised the budget looking for an specific aesthetic, like constructing the nursing home instead of finding.
It´s is curious how the scene of the rescue at the end is absent, is it needed? I have to ask myself, for whom is Kawase filming? The funny thing is that watching the making of I realized that the sequence was shot but is not on the final montage. In a much more poetic way, ambiguous, Machiko looks at the sky playing the music box, her eyes full of faith, the helicopter starts to enter the soundtrack approaching, but they are in a zone completely under huge trees, can they see them?

Here an INTERVIEW with Naomi Kawase.

All About my Mother (Fish Tank)

2011-06-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

It has taken me a while to write about Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) why? Well, it's interesting but I didn't know what I thought about it when I saw it for the first time, but I saw it again. Like 6 years ago I saw the short film that she did called WASP and I also didn't know what to think about it. The short was about a young mother living with not much money, she already has a kid and when the guy that she really liked comes from the past and invites her to the pub to drink, having nobody to leave her kid with she just leaves him out on the back of the pub in his baby car. The thing is that it happens what you would never think could happened, a wasp comes flying and stings the baby on the mouth. How would you feel about this really well made moment on the screen? An over the top moral lesson from the gods?, a melodramatic animal planet tacky gadget, an out of nowhere element of a screenplay that wasn't serious enough? but so surprising.
I should have written about Fish Tank the first time I saw it just for one scene, just with that scene it is a great film, not just the scene but where in the screenplay is the scene situated. When 15 years old Mia (Katie Jarvis) finds out who really is the man for whom she shares with her mother the problem of being in love with. Mia runs after a little girl dress as a princess in a marsh, the scene is so many things at the same time and it works in so many levels perfectly justified, but the realism is outstanding. This is what puts Andrea Arnold next to a filmmaker like Lynne Ramsay (taking more about Ratcatcher and her shorts) the expressiveness that comes from the realism that they construct is used to jump into surreal illuminating moments made with things inside the frame from the reality that mirror the mind of the subject. It's difficult to explain it, you need to see the films, but it's a powerful ability made with a strong sensibility; maybe Ramsay used to make it much more with the camera support but its similar. The film talks about certain characters that Andrea Arnold knows perfectly, about the main's character world, and she never leaves her main character. We see through Mia's detailed actions and surrounding what she is like, and we understand why the things that happen in the film affect her in such a way, we are made part of everything; but Mia's reactions can't be calculated and that's where the film is so fortunate. I just read that the actors didn't know what was going to happen the next week of shooting, so maybe that's where this quality resides. We don't feel in such a perfectly ordered specific way about Mia as in Hollywood movies you feel about the main character, that's a delight indeed.

No-Do (The Haunting, 2009)

2011-06-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

A false prophet in a strange land, Guillermo del Toro, has been giving mainstream Spanish horror film industry an international face for a while now. On the side we have seen different interesting proposals by native Spanish directors like the prolific Jaume Balguero or the more radical Nacho Cerda. Spain has a long time TRADITION of more campy low budget cryptic horror film since the 60's with directors like Jesse Franco, Jose Ramon Larraz, or Armando de Ossorio. I mean even an orthodox successful director like Vicente Aranda, started his own career with a film of these, The Blood Spattered Bride (1972) which I recently had a chance to check out. Here a very weird TRAILER that holds the spirit of those crazy times.
We can't stop saying that Franco died in 1975, a couple of years before was when this films where born, and they are so much intertwined.

During Franco's dictatorship years, there was an official newsreel called No-Do, supposedly there where certain No-Do reels that where kept private only for certain officials and people in the Vatican to see; this idea gives life to The Haunting (Elio Quiroga, 2009). Francesca (the almost cinematic fetish Ana Torrent) is trying to get her psyche straight after her daughter died many year ago, in company of her husband she moves to a mansion on some deserted creepy hills in the country side. Of course there are trapped demons behind its walls and of course there is more than a very dark story; the main one shows an opposite version of what happened in Fatima in the year 1917.

The film is good and it is because it takes time to develop things, not just took the time to take care of the details in the screenplay or the actors reactions, also the post production is like frame by frame museum art. It's made with such a good craft by La Huella (visual effects) that I really hope that Quiroga makes his next feature in Spain not in Hollywood (despite his success in America) so he can maintain his complete freedom and he can deliver only what we can imagine for the times being. It's just a question of certain texture reworked many times and the film gives you the creeps, it takes you inside the screen, instead of making you feel that you are in a Disney's ride.
Quiroga understands that horror film works thanks to the correct atmospheres, but he also knows very well that every look, every cut, every sound is part of that atmosphere.

Family Viewing (It's Your Fault, 2010)

2011-06-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

The intimate and enigmatic It's Your Fault (Anahí Berneri, 2010) runs practically on real time but it's way different than Mike Figgis' spectacle juggling approach (Time Code, Hotel) or the approach by contemporary Romanian film making just commented recently on this blog, with its cold and sober surgical process. It's Your Fault begins playing with our cinematic notions of space and time, we get anxious at the beginning when the scene doesn't ends until we get the inciting incident without a brake in time. Also the camera is so very close to the characters, mainly to Julieta (Erica Rivas) who is the mother of the two kids that jump and throw tantrums constantly around her. Curiously this is a film that must had been made because it meets two contemporary styles that have never been together, one is the angular lens on the face of the characters that is one of the legacies of music videos immortalized by film makers like Danny Boyle or Christoffer Boe, who depend so much in jump cut montage. Here we don't have jump cuts, almost an independence of editing. On the other hand, real time film making, had never been so physically close to its characters.
Julieta tries to work one night but her two kids are definitely not letting her until there is an accident and the youngest falls from a motorcycle that was on top of a bed and she decides to take him to the hospital. In the clinic the doctor suspects that she has been hurting the kids and makes a judicial claim that very night.
Most of the reflections that I had during the film and after were about individual freedom, collective freedom, family inside the social structure part of a political regime that doesn't care about the individual. Julieta doesn't have enough time to be playing with her kids, when she does play she can't put limits and she is economic pressured to finish so she can make money so the kids have what they need in life. She is enslaved by her kids, and by her husband to whom she is separated. She thinks that earning money can help her fill the gap that just doesn't stop getting bigger between she and her family, she tries to fill the gap with gameboys, mechanical cars, toys, clothes, cartoon DVDs, but these things just makes her environment much more violent and unreachable. The cherry in the pie comes from being if something over protective, after the youngest kid falls hard, she decides to go to the clinic in that instant. The fall wasn't that hard, but she is over worried, she doesn't leave her mother program mode and this only gets her into much more trouble. Her answers to the doctor questions are what really puts her in trouble, but nobody really cares that she is about to have a nervous brake down. No matter what she does, she is always going to be guilty.

Imaginary Friend (The Beaver, 2011)

2011-06-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

I was 16 years old when I saw Little Man Tate (Jodie Foster, 1991), I was starting to hate mainstream movies as I began to be in touch with Buñuel and Fellini, but against all odds I loved the film. Jodie Foster has been an actress in front of the camera since she was 7, who doesn't remember her in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) when she was 14 for example. She's played many archetypical Hollywood characters in her career working with very talented directors, she has learned her craft in front and behind the camera but as an artist she has a powerful sensibility.
In The Beaver (Jodie Foster, 2011) she helps Mel Gibson perform as he has never perform before and at the same time be his wife in front of the camera being an unlikeable character. Walter Black (Mel Gibson) is trapped in a depression that only permits him sleep all day and all night long, he reaches a point where he has to leave his family. In an apartment after drinking half a bottle of gin and trying to make a Kun Fu master drink from the TV screen, he tries to commit suicide. A stuffed beaver puppet stops him, after presenting himself, he starts talking for him. Walter comes back to the world with a new energy, he feels better, he's better, but he can only talk through the puppet.
The film plays straight, but is full of marvelous undertones, also playing with film genres as if it was a game, but a serious one. It jumps from a family melodrama to a thriller and next moment we are in a demonic possession horror movie in instants; just imagine a film that uses slapstick comedy to develop character. The camera usage is very interesting, the master shots are regular, but the cut away close ups are forced, they are short and much more inside the axis than the language being used; its a way to see those moments in the character, moments that later justify a change in behavior.
For Lacan it would be a fantastic artistic object to explore, Walter who is castrated three times and who is totally out of his reality as a man gets back his imaginary penis through the beaver, but later the castration is the tragic punishment. He gains his manhood through imagination as a creative process and then he gets really castrated.
Also intertextuality almost plays as witchcraft, Walter is about to jump from the balcony and he almost reproduces the moment of the Christmas jump by the naked woman in Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987), so we can infer that he is loosing his manhood position in a cinematic unconscious way. Also he tries to have interaction through the TV with someone that hanged himself in reality in a hotel room under strange circumstances: David Carradine. That's what Walter tries to do first in the bathroom, hang himself.
At the end the film accelerates, I think for budget commercial reasons and we get a lot of ellipsis that shouldn't be there, I personally missed the resolution having another rhythm, not an emotive montage. When the film finishes we get a lot of anxiety and questions like now that he is not working in the company where he experienced this surreal fast success what is he going to do?, we can think that he is going to be there with his little son while he grows up, but the thing that his son liked about his dad was the beaver. One of the reasons that made his wife like him again was the way he started to perform in bed with the beaver, even if she said that she hated the beaver, that's clear in awesomely shot erotic scenes between the two, well the three of them. Now how are they going to work this out? Even in a great intelligent production like The Beaver, Hollywood always leaves the interesting stuff out, here is where other kind of cinema could begin a much more deeper film but not as commercial. But then you wouldn't have Jodie Foster neither Mel Gibson, and both of them make this a great film.
It's impressive how Jodie Foster knows about men's world, this is a masculine film and she is just wise about it.

Hardcore (A Serbian Film, 2010)

2011-06-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

Since some years ago I decided to write in this blog only about films that I liked, also about new films, both decisions have been difficult to follow but that's how things are. I'm going to write now about a film that leaves the perversity of a film like Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002) like a mediocre episode of The Simpsons; ok, maybe Southpark if you like.
Is not that I liked watching A Serbian Film (Srdjan Spasojevic), I think is an atrocious approach to storytelling on the big screen, but what's interesting is the difference with the depravity of the approach of certain common contemporary mainstream auteurs like Rob Zombie or Gaspar Noe, who violate just for the sake of spectacle.
A Serbian Film is divided in two parts, in the first we met an ex porno star and his beautiful son and wife. The second one is diffused by the effects of drugs on the film shot in first person, giving it a structure of violent (in form and content) flash backs shaping the tragedy that the main character is recalling little by little, is the common fractured structure used a lot now a days, for example like in a movie like Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000).
The main character is trying to live a normal life, a home depot reality, after living as a God of certain circles of hell. A nostalgic feeling added to his economy and the consciousness of not being able to do anything right as fucking in front of a camera, makes him fall prey of the seduction of a new way of making "porno as art."
Spasojevic takes excellent decisions with an exploitation argument not playing it straight. for example making his main character likeable, his face (please just watch his haircut), the way he treats his family; in some cases he is almost a victim like with his brother trying to seduce his wife and he being trapped in this dark mansion against his own will. But the interesting thing here is how he uses the power of cinema as metaphors of reality, not as a perverse reality itself, this is what makes him a filmmaker much more in touch with Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975) or Jean Claude-Brisseau (The Exterminating Angels, 2006) than with the directors cited above. Maybe he is not talking about things with enough depth, maybe he doesn't shoot with the same elegance, maybe he lacks coherence in his full speech; but I'm talking about film phrases that are grotesque dark fogy mirrors of our reality. For example in a film inside the film, a snuff film, the main character sees a new born being raped. Immediately we are connected to ourselves, not to what is going on with a movie that wants to pull attention to itself; this is what happened to us, not physically but in other ways. Beyond all its gruesome explicitly bad taste A Serbian Film is an interesting moral movie.
As a subtext we can also see a dialogue about eastern Europe left behind by an hypocrite western society, a place where during war everything was permitted and now war continues not in the obvious ways, Euros are not for everybody. An opposite message and way of filmmaking than Eli Roth's amoral amusement in the Hostel series.

Here an interview with the director in Spanish.

Wherever you are...

2011-05-27T12:52:00.000-07:00

Jean be Kind (Jean Gentil, 2010)

2011-05-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

Laura Amelia Guzman and Israel Cardenas have become one of the few interesting options in our, not dead, we can even talk about an undead Mexican Cinema.
A couple years ago I rented Cochochi (2007) from the blockbuster, because sadly as a Mexican and also a filmmaker, it should be a responsibility to see what ever comes from the mirror of our ultra abused country. I was gladly surprised; since watching the films of Nicolas Echevarria I hadn't seen a camera as truthful and as close (in many ways) as this, to the faces of the real people who conform our under extinction ancient culture. Following two indigenous teenage brothers (non actors) through marvelous landscapes (internal and external) on a quest to find a lost horse, Guzman and Cardenas made a touching film. Shooting with simplicity, modesty, and honesty gave the couple a huge success on the screen. They found truth, which now a days is so tough to reach.
Now they have gone "further" with a film called Jean Gentil (2010), but the pretension is very present. But you know what? it's very welcome, because it's fueled by good intentions, social consciousness and with an ingenuity which puts it close to the heart.
Jean (Jean Remy Gentil) is a Haitian man running away from the earth quake hell that his country has become. In Santo Domingo things start getting very difficult for Jean until he ends up trying to survive in the jungle.
The result that comes up from the work with Jean is outstanding, but the contrast with other characters is obvious and very contrived. The film remind me of the work of Jean Rouch but in ways that I don't know if are bad or good, it jumps from dream like states to dry sober ones in a very powerful way but without the control that the master used to have.
The colors, compositions, lines are used very dynamically. During many moments we are inside an art naive moving painting, but most of the times this elements affect the pace and drama that with a lot of effort Guzman and Cardenas had achieve. This didn't happen in Cochochi, everything was much more organic, but here the challenge was very tough. Also Cochochi never sins of a tourist point of view.
But one thing is more clear now than ever, Laura Amelia Guzman and Israel Cardenas shoot with a part of the body that most of us almost don't use at all: The Heart.
I can't wait to see their next film, please shoot us through the heart guys, with LOVE :)

Sheer Simplicity (Come Undone, 2010)

2011-05-25T17:16:00.000-07:00

Anna (Alba Rohrwacher) is not gorgeous, at the most, she's a little sexy, Domenico (Pierfrancesco Favino) is not handsome but masculine; in part this is what makes Come Undone (Silvio Soldini, 2010) a very enjoyable movie. Anna is married to Alessio (Giuseppe Battiston) who notably gives her a lot of things but never has made her feel like Domenico did since she met him, a feeling in her guts that she couldn't resist neither wanted to stop. Silvio Soldini, the acclaimed director of Bread and Tulips (2000, which I've never seen) is serious about erasing all big contrasts, a war against his own roots: the Italian melodrama. This kitchen sink dry drama is powerful because of its simplicity. The audience starts to feel not just for Anna as she starts loosing control on the situation, but also for Domenico with a second act that makes us part of his life. He's having economic troubles, he has a wife that loves him but also she and his lovely daughter (who's crazy about fish) are his day to day bread, the common stuff which contrast with the hot new views.
Also the amount of weight that some objects have for a film made in this decade is remarkable.
Alessio is a very likeable character, but we don't hate our protagonist for lying to him, for being unfaithful, we understand and even feel.

The Anxiety Before Morning Break (Aurora, 2010)

2011-04-30T06:48:00.001-07:00

Romanian films have been doing some noise since some years ago, not just because of festival veneration or the trend that some critics start, that's just a result from a coherent way of filmmaking. When a strong style, form, comes from the inside, from its philosophy and even deeper when it depends on a national collective consciousness and traumas, in this case the Romanian dark age under communism; then you really have a strong current.
Cristi Puiu was there when these films started making noise with his The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), which followed (in almost real time) the final days of its main character, from house to house, familiars to friends, trying to get better from his sickness until he ends up dissolved in the Romanian public social health system; almost as if it was some direct cinema documentary from the 60's but in a contrast the style with which it was shot remain done with great care.
These Romanian films that are being called a new wave, share the naturalistic approach to the image not just in the way that the scene is draw with the characters motion in front the camera, or the exposure/lighting as if it was a documentary, but the length of the takes is much more than what you will expect from a "slow" film, virtuous camera work that goes further to what appears in front of the eye. Also there is a total absence of external montage and musical score. In essence all these films are different social studies, made not just with great actors but with a completely rigorous work with them.
Aurora (Cristi Puiu, 2010) is not an exception but it takes all this notions further. The director Cristi Puiu puts himself in front of the camera as the laconic Polanski of the 70's used to, playing Viorel. The camera follows (more that following its waiting for him) Viorel through different landscapes of Bucharest, a continuous psychological drawing that plays with our perception hiding information that for a thriller would be logical not just to include but to fortify every now and then. We don't know why the Viorel is doing what he is doing, but we comprehend that its a globalized reaction that soon could be common, killing for no reason?. Not just what he does but the logic in his head, the anxiety that makes him walk, react, talk.
The rigor in the directing actors department is the floor that can hold all these other structures, that depend on an almost polaroid at 24 frames per second screen reality. Imagine if Italian Neorealism was torn apart from the melodramatic approach of its authors, imagine the author trying to fade away in the consciousness of his own country, but he can't he's still there in front of the lens of his own camera.

Button, Button... (The Box, 2009)

2011-04-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

Southland Tales (Kelly, 2006) didn't have a huge audience, but the people who liked it (including me) were very worried about Kelly's future after the big failure at the box office; much more worried than for example with Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006).
The difference was enormous, Southland Tales wasn't understood and The Fountain was a very bad film with a huge budget. Aronofsky responded fast and created a sincere film, for once not relaying on designing for effect or on visual gadgets to fill dramatic or narrative gaps; this naked drama was called The Wrestler (2008) and had one of the best performances of the decade. Again Aronofsky got the support of the studios sadly jumping back to where he was before, without learning his lesson. Black Swan (2010) was made getting many Oscar nominations, winning a very well earned one for Natalie Portman as best actress (she is getting better everyday).
It was announced that Richard Kelly was going to make an adaptation of "Button, button" an enigmatic episode of the Twilight Zone 80's TV series, I immediately thought about another great promise selling out for fear of the box office.
Last week I walked in a Blockbuster and along the corridors of the usual stuff, I saw the face of Cameron Diaz who plays Norma Lewis in The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009). What a nice surprise seeing later at my DVD player that The Box only used the T.Z episode as a starting point, the whole film was amazingly insane, not just inventive through characters and sets designs. Kelly was smart enough to share the mission of writing such a complex screenplay with the writer of the original episode, Richard Matheson, who's also prolific fiction writer; between his creations Matheson wrote the cult book I am Legend, which I haven't read yet but which was made later into a movie that the fans of the book hate.
The film starts with an intimate story of a couple, Norma (re discovering Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) slowly and in an elegant way we learn that this is not an American family drama, it has to do not just with a very critic era of the US consolidation, but also with crazy secret NASA projects about time travel and Mars. The screenplay relays a lot on characters, their past, their relations, their representation; so the story is never too much, it never gets diluted in the action sequences as it happens with every other Hollywood film. The acting jumps from the realistic to the farce in very interesting curves that have to do with the dimension the film is talking about, with the level of reality.
Again Kelly uses the American collective unconscious as a role playing game with a lot of dexterity; using irregular dices that go from David Lynch's mystery man to Harry Potter.
At a certain point in the film it really doesn't matter what is going on, you don't have to "understand", but you definitely want to know what is going to happen next.

Lawyers Armed with Cameras and Balls (Presumed Guilty, 2008)

2011-04-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

Presumed Guilty (Roberto Hernández/Goeffrey Smith, 2008) is a very scary horror film for people who reside in Mexico.
Two years before, Hernández made El Túnel, which was a very effective 26 minutes documentary about the penitentiary Mexican system. It was an excellent piece not just because it showed the contradictions of the system, its inefficiency and its corruption, but because it also gave a start for a solution. El Túnel proved that oral trials would helped a lot in Mexico, and gave Chile's case as an example, where oral trials helped a lot clarifying the panorama through the fog that written ones generated.
Presumed Guilty is a documentary about Toño, who was accused of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. During the 87 minutes that the bravely shot on video film lasts, we learn that the trials in Mexico are done in the worst ways and how almost anybody can end up in prison most of the time being innocent. In Mexico a defendant has to prove that he is not guilty, not the other way around as it's much more logical, the police having to prove that you are guilty; as it happens with better systems.
Since certain years ago I have constantly asked myself in depth the question: what is the function of cinema? In this case besides freeing an innocent guy, who is very young and with a lot of projects in sight; the film draws a possibility of changing the rotten judicial Mexican laws.

Aspects of making this documentary a very scary movie were some numbers:

-In Mexico 95% of the sentences are condemnatory.

-92% of the convictions are not based on physical evidence.

In Mexico a police man earns less than what you imagine, there are fatal "errors" of the system like paying to the police officers for each person that he arrests a bonus. So it doesn't matter if someone commits a crime, the thing is to get a civilian in jail to charge the money. So imagine an enormous restaurant of police people as waiters, who almost don't have a salary; imagine them running for the tip: putting innocent people behind bars, who obviously have to be poor and without friends in powerful positions.

A shame of a restaurant, would you eat there?

Again Hernández goes further and attacks straight, making the most of the moment. He uses what he recorded on video of the trial to show the appeal comparing it to what was written by the judge; the difference was remarkable and justice was made.
Now Hernández is trying to force the system on stopping written trails with a first step, recording on video every trial.

If you wish to help the cause go to:

http://presuntoculpable.org/en/index.aspx

The Nymph that Came from Under the Earth (Marebito, 2004)

2010-11-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

Takashi Shimizu was the responsible for directing the master piece that fused all the ghost trapped in a curse tendency of the late 90's Japanese film tendency, Ju-on (2002). Before remaking it for Hollywood for the second time with the always pleasant presence of Sarah Michelle Gellar, he did a piece shot on video that could work as those small letters in a legal contract if there was such for the democratization of the media, the digital era.
In Marebito (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) works as a camera operator for TV, also makes videos of weird and dark things, also lives his life as a video, also records life through video, also lives on video. Masuoka "accidentally" records how a man drives a knife through his eye. After watching it many times on the computer editing it, he concludes that the man blinded himself because he saw something that was too much to see, something that he no longer wanted to see; Masuoka starts to look for that something everywhere. Masuoka finds it in an underground city, a place on the route to Agartha, she has a beautiful female body, her ankle chained, and has huge fangs. As in the masterpiece Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) Masuoka soon discovers that the nymph that came from under the earth needs human blood to survive, so his downward spiral starts.
Takashi Shimizu makes evident that he is shooting on video, the whole point of the film is about digital technology, digital perception, how the viewer decides how the ending of a movie happens, how a human can decide not really about what happens in his life but the signification of the events, the truth dimension.
Shinya Tsukamoto, the video obsessive, is a film director himself in real life, his style helped to shape cinema in this century, without films that he directed like Tetsuo (1989) or Tokyo Fist (1995) this century would have another approximation to the image.

Pink Flamingos Fying Over the Cuckoo's Nest (My Son my Son, What Have ye Done)

2010-10-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

Recently Werner Herzog has been making cop movies in Hollywood, but they are not what you will imagine of a police thriller, he directs connecting with his young years as a member of the New German Cinema, the most elegant camp, very much influenced by his own experience as an opera director. It took me a week to understand that his sequel to Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992) wasn't a bad movie but a great film. Logically it catch the attention of a specialist in farce, someone who could understand the genius of his proposal, this person is David Lynch who actually was the executive producer for his second attempt, an almost part two of a trilogy, My Son my Son, What Have ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009). The style is not just very similar to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans, but takes further on the camp style on a big budget production. Remember Nicholas Cage that seemed to be reciting bad poetry, like if he was making a cold reading of dialogues on cocaine, constructing a reality that is much more real than any TV show or commercial movie about the American nightmare, more raw than a reality TV show like COPS. The raw comes from the stylization, from the farce that really gives him the distance for getting closer to the subject.
Detective Hank Havenhurst (William Dafoe) arrives to the place where a murder was recently perpetuated, Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) just killed his mom (Grace Zabriskie) who also was Laura Palmer's mom in Twin Peaks. Brad goes inside his apartment saying that he has two hostages, his girlfriend Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny) and the theater play director Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) arrive to the crime scene to talk to the detective so we know the story on how Brad started to loose his mind until reaching the point of killing her mom as a part of a ritual.
Herzog works once more with virtuous cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger who's camera never stays still, it moves all around in a steady cam full of neutral spaces where no character is present then we reach another character and move to the next neutral space to wait for the next appearance, it just gives the film a cadence that is almost musical, but at certain parts he cuts and cuts hard, jump cuts as a highlight that give certain internal climax to the scenes.
Herzog goes as far as reproducing tableu vivants with his actors looking straight to the camera's lenses, scenes full of intertextuality about his own films: Dwarfs in the Stroszek's planes. Film about film that confronts the internal logics of the country that rules the world.
Michael Shannon gives a very enjoyable performance that is a kind of mix between Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) and Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001), but under Herzog supervision becomes another ingredient of a big budget avant garde piece.
So Brad didn't loose his mind in Peru where under the same mountains that Herzog shot his Aguirre, didn't went to the river rapids where his friends never returned from, he didn't loose it in the play where the character that he was playing had to kill her mother to become close to the Gods, Brad just open his mind to the synchronicity and flew over the cuckoo's nest, finally finding his edipical rest.

Reality Bites (Afterschool, 2008)

2010-10-12T08:26:00.000-07:00

Everything that would be important for another filmmaker, as actions to be shot in spectacular ways, its out of frame in Afterschool (Antonio Campos, 2008) which uses the sound as no other American independent film has since The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999).
Robert (Ezra Miller) is a teenager who goes to a private school of those that you also live in, those that you have to dress like all the students who study there, yes he wears a tie, it's a school with a good name. In this school a couple of popular twins are like sacred icons to the rest of students and the faculty, they are called with their last names "the Talberts". In his dorm, everything is different, Robert watches porn at night on his computer with the lights out and the only physical presence of the hand lotion and the kleenex box by his side; his room mate deals drugs.
Robert has a special girl who walks in life with the name of Amy (Addison Timlin), cute little pie that is anxious to loose her virginity with Robert. They like each other even when its difficult to like each other in a world that is for fucking; together they are working on a video documentary for an assignment but Robert will soon find through the camera that reality is worst that what he thinks it is and it just keeps getting worst.
The first feature film from Antonio Campos, who really went to one of this prep schools in real life according to IMDb.com, son of a movie producer and a Brazilian TV journalist, is shot with a very different sensibility with which American indy films are shot with; it has less to do with Jarmusch, Tarantino or Raimi, having much more in common with early approaches to cinema by masters like Atom Egoyan or Michael Haneke. What is very interesting is his articulation of what is not in the frame, being much more important than what is visible, almost in an Oriental film tradition think about Tsai Ming-liang. But he adds something to the equation, his character gazes, we are behind them most of the times, we are part of what happens but having difficulty in really seeing; the whole movie is almost like the scene in Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) in which a woman answers the phone sitting on the side of the bed, the dolly moves with her sitting down but not passing completely the door; her head is chopped. William Fraker cinematographer of Polanski's film said that he was very confused when the director asked for that specific camera position, but when he actually saw the edited film he understood the tension that Polanski was after, it simply worked. I imagine that in Afterschool the cinematographer understood perfectly what Campos was after, we are in other times, and the form of narration is perfect to illustrate the world we live in. We watch TV without watching, for seconds we almost read a paragraph of a web article at the same time that a digital song is playing from our Ipod, while we also chat and maybe we are having a cel phone conversation or a skype one; this is if we are not in a public place where things get worst, or is it better? This is the kind of filmmaking that will be happening ofter, a mirror of our reality, a reality inside our digital mirror, where the real questions are being asked.
Drugs hypocrisy versus the reality in drugs usage, the reason for drugs to be, pornography ontology of the mouse click, sex and romance in an alienated almost totally robotized contemporary society, taboos in a world that goes against constructing taboos. Violence. Afterschool goes deeper in the path that Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) built, not answering but keeping asking.

Antonio Campos's Interview

Army of Shadows (The Messenger, 2010)

2010-10-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

The Messenger (2010) by first time director Oren Moverman is a very well constructed character driven piece, which is not a surprise because Moverman has already been a successful screenwriter for a decade in Hollywood. What starts as a movie that we have seen winning Oscars and being praised by the press many times (imagine A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992) mixed with Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986)), slowly shifts into a contradictory sweet story that works as a road movie without going too far.
Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) comes back from Iraq, he has been wounded in action, having to take big amounts of drops for his damaged eye and it doesn't seems to be getting any better soon. He gets a new assignment for his new life in America, he will work with Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) notifying families about their recently deceased relatives, missed in action. Stone will drink alcohol again after many years of staying sober, Montgomery will lose the girl of his life, but they both will finally start a new life that will be born from the fire of friendship, coming from the heart. An anti war film without being obvious, searching for humanity in the smallest detail, questioning politics that are ruling over individual human rights. A very entertaining film that strongly makes you feel deep emotions through the actions of two very well constructed characters being played by two excellent actors that worked great together. Is not what young and restless Foster does or experienced Harrelson provides, is what both together as one create. The invisible hand of the director is very efficient, the whole and the parts are tight and balanced. Elegant humor and accurate observations of human nature, about these times, of the irony of being alive are very welcome. Social conventions, perceptions and assumptions are very well shot by a camera that is never gratuitous or even attracts any attention to itself in any way.

F for fool's (Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010)

2010-09-27T17:46:00.000-07:00

So what the f... is Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010) anyway? It's not a documentary, neither a mockumentary, nor a piece of reality TV, it seems more like the perfect game for actual times. It is born inside the screen, it goes beyond, and its not really a film. Orson Welles made a documentary film called F for Fake in 1973, in it he talked about themes that he knew very well: "lies resting in truths and the truth asleep in all lies". In that film Welles explored art forgery in many ways, Banksy's remind me of the premise and expands it in its own way. When I heard that Banksy made a film I immediately was turn on, it was an artist who could give the medium some of what it's been missing, it's been a while since it has only been swimming around in circles for a while and in the same pool. He not just comes from another medium which is graffitti and street art, almost making interventions of them, but revolutionizing it in so many fantastic ways. I thought that this film was going to be a expressive poetic rampage that could be compared in my mind to Makavajev, Parajanov or even the Quay Brothers or all of them mixed together. But I was wrong, Exit Through the Gift Shop is conventional at its best, I was let down. But later I start to thought about it, it wasn't what I thought it was, it's a game of perceptions, an unplugged reflection on spectacles inside the spectacle, it is sharp and it affected reality in different ways directly. You can't be sure what is real and what is not, and definitely is fun, fun, fun.
Thierry Guetta, who later changes his name to Mr.Brainwash, is our protagonist, he is French but lives in LA where he made a lot of money selling used clothes. In a present time he talks to us in a talking head medium shot, he tells us that he used to record everything on video and one day he started to record his cousin who was a street artist called space invader. He recorded his beginnings, his ascension and later he started to record many very important artists in the scene, passing through Shepard Fairey until he finally reaches Banksy who ends up transforming him into a very acclaimed street artist. The whole thing feels fake but what is much more fun is that Mr. Brainwash starts to be a success in the real art market, for a fact even the last Madonna best hits album cover was made by him. So it seems that a possibility could be that is all done and invented by Banksy; I mean he is already a genius but this is a very sick joke that everyone fell for, even Madonna. Mr. Brainwash "art" is awful is like another joke on the joke that the art circuit has become, on the bad joke that the world is becoming.
Banksy used to be a flag for a whole way of attacking the system an intelligent rebellion, brave but with a good taste; of course the system ate it like all good things in life, but Banksy's revenge is sweet, you can't even say what the f... is this and what will happen next.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/04/banksy_mr_brainwash.html

Lord of the Flies (The Ghost Writer, 2010)

2010-09-27T03:24:00.000-07:00

The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski,2010) is a very well directed movie, with all its elements in the correct place, correct dosage and order. A perfectly balanced intimate political thriller naked from any cinematic or dramatic excess. If film can be seen as a the particular timing of the flow of images and sounds in the screen, Polanski is a very mature filmmaker.
A ghost writer is someone who is payed to write someone else book, mostly biographies. A ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) is going to write Britain's prime minister Adam Lang's (Pierce Brosnan) biography. He is sent to an island in New England where Lang is going to stay, a small house that is a combination between a bunker and a modern museum; full of bodyguards and sexual tension. The last ghost writer who previously tried to write the biography was found drowned in the shores of the same island as the opening of the movie. Soon, Lang is accused by another politician of a dirty business with terrorism and the US, a mayor case that very soon becomes a CNN scandal. The new ghost writer is caught by the storm and flies away with the tornado.
Polanski builds the tension from inside out and slowly like a good cook; he knows how to portrait his characters, how to make them show themselves through action, how to construct obvious conflict and also subtextual. But he also knows how to play with the audience perception through images that suggest and don't really say directly. For example the BMW, we know it was the car that the last ghost writer used when he died, but its still there in the house for the guests to use, and our protagonist uses it on the third act of the film after finding very dangerous information. Sexuality is used very effectively, on many levels and with many purposes. Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall) is Adam Land's secretary and right hand, Land's wife is called Ruth (Olivia Williams) and together with the ghost writer construct many kind of different triangles that continually keep on changing shapes and affecting the drama and our empathy. The ghost writer is a wonderful filmmaker's mature work and also entertaining.

Drag me to Hell! (El Infierno / Hell, 2010)

2010-09-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

El Infierno / aka Hell is the bravest film I have seen in quite some time, its a punch on the guts to Mexicans who think that nothing is happening in their country just because its not happening in their pretty neighborhoods; a cold shower for Mexicans who think that we have to lie and pretend that nothing is happening, that we have to keep on exporting Corona commercial TV spots that show our greatness to the whole world, while a war is being fought. This is a more violent war than the ones that are declared openly in different parts of the world. Government's anti narcotics war started since the beginning of the new presidents term, and until now thousands and thousands of dead people, and no resolution to be find; but the way the people are being killed is what gets my attention, so much violence and hate inside each dead. Mexico City used to be the most violent part of the country some years ago, now it's the safest, and the crime rate in the city hasn't lessen at all.
In a hardcore version of his own film Herod's Law (1999, Luis Estrada) Estrada tells us the story of Benny Garcia (Damian Alcazar again) who comes to his home town after 20 years of being in the United States, he didn't have a great time he says. In his town everything is changed, the ruling power are the "narcos" (drug dealers) with their flashy style that contrasts with the poor surroundings, dirt roads which they drive with expensive trucks, over the top glamorous ranchero's clothing with which they drink cerveza (beer) and tequila in stinky canteens. Benny finds his sister in law (Elizabeth Cervantes) working as a prostitute and starts a romance with her, trying to take care of his nephew who after a while is clear that has already started walking the narco's path. After not having where to go, Benny starts working with El Cochiloco (a wonderfully cast as always Joaquin Cosio) for the Reyes, one of the drug dealing families: Don Jose Reyes (an amazing Ernesto Gomez Cruz) and Mari Reyes (Maria Rojo). Benny is going to find all kinds of hate, violence, passion, abuse, unfairness, deliverance, arrogance, hypocrisy stupidity, corruption, solidarity, lies, lust, abuse, etc..., in his road to hell.
The screen play is not totally well done, it's kind of raw, it's full of gaps and the film is kind of clumsy, goofy, but Estrada's films have always been strange, they have other structures and other intentions. But the message is clear, someone had to say it as a responsible act, and some of the scenes are just fantastic, emblematic. It's not a realistic approach to the conflict, people wouldn't have take it, if they saw it by mistake they would run off instantly from the cinema. Estrada knows how the Mexican mind works, with humor everything is possible you can even make fun of the most powerful people in the country; that's how it always has been, since Porfirio Diaz days and always will. El Infierno is a grotesque caricature that causes painful laughs at the same time that it's disturbing, it's the truth in a sick joke: no one is ruling this country right now.

Can You Talk to Him? (Chloe, 2009)

2010-09-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

I know more than one person besides me that thought that Atom Egoyan wasn't capable of making a descent film again after The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan, 1997), well we were wrong after being frustrated again and again with his recent attempts. The Sweet Hereafter was a bridge to commercial cinema, the 4 millions that it cost gave it another look than his earlier films, Exotica (Egoyan, 1994) and The Adjuster (Egoyan, 1991) were worried about a certain glamorous look but they were translations of the director's obsession through screen eccentricities, modern abstract erotic fables influenced by the absurd in the Samuel Becket's tradition, and also by the contemporary form; for example he used to be an indirect film equivalence to Paul Auster fiction. But Atom Egoyan wasn't satisfied; he changed his strong cult followers for a bigger audience and The Sweet Hereafter was made, its also a normal process that for example happened also to a countryman who shares some of his qualities, David Cronenberg. Or we could even think about the names who direct the most expensive movies for the studios today, think about Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson beginnings and they started in very independent adventures made with their own hands: The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) or Badtaste (Peter Jackson, 1987).
In The Sweet Hereafter Egoyan worked for the first time an adaptation of a book, but it remains being a modern fable; it even used the Pied Piper of Hamelin fairytale as a leit motiv. But this time the realism was much stronger than before no room for absurdity or any weird sense. With that film Egoyan start using consecrated actors like Ian Holm, introducing great ones like Sarah Polley, and offering to the mainstream some of the talents with which he built his underground kingdom including his extraordinary musician Mychael Danna. But the film worked very good, an eloquent and endearing experience, that showed the human nature more deeply than his previous films, even if his voice wasn't as authentic as it used to be.
He lost his new audience and his old one with his next movies. The unbearable Felicia's Journey (Egoyan, 1999) the unwatchables without sleeping first Ararat (Egoyan, 2002) and Adoration (2008), and the "Is this really an Atom Egoyan's Film? I thought it was a very bad Soderbergh's": Where the Truth Lies (Egoyan, 2005) imagine Atom Egoyan directing Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth in the same film, it's funny right? If you answer yes then you haven't seen the film.

So what makes Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009) such a good film? I think that the success in it is that its clear that it doesn't takes itself so serious. To start with its a remake of a very successful French film called Nathalie... (Anne Fontaine, 2003), Egoyan's version is even produced by Ivan Reitman so the commercial approach to make an art film director direct a remake with enormous chance of being a block buster is on the table upfront. For the first time Egoyan finds his own new style, his tone for a broader audience, its great Egoyan congratulations. It's lovely what he does with Julian Moore playing the gynecologist Catherine Steward, who contracts a prostitute to seduce her own husband trying to discover his suspected infidelities. Julianne Moore understands the complexity of what Egoyan is trying to do, the tone of the acting, the subtleness, this operation can be compared with Pedro Almodovar jump also. Almodovar unsuccessfully tried many times before finally accomplishing a film like Talk to Her (Almodovar, 2002) re-elaborating his own personal cinematic myths from the first period of his career and winning an Oscar in the way.

Man Bites Dog (Dogtooth)

2010-08-28T15:21:00.000-07:00

The Greek film Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009) recently awarded at Cannes is an unconscious, or is it conscious? terrific remake of the Mexican film, Castle of Purity (Arturo Ripstein, 1973). In a beautiful house with a beautiful garden with a beautiful swimming pool (like the one you used to imagine while listening to the Talking Heads song). Inside the house a father (Christos Stergioglou) is keeping his two young adult daughters (Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni) and his son kidnapped with the help of his wife (Michele Valley) under a totally invented regime against the real world. He has taught his family his own rules following his crazy thoughts, he has built his kingdom with lies but he is the king. He frightens them telling them stories about cats from the outside world and how they can eat them alive so they have to kneel down and bark as dogs, he also points to them airplanes flying in the open air and with the help of his wife drops them down while she throws toy airplanes so the children can see his power. Other comedy taste like when the father after his son kills a cat in the garden uses a knife to cut his shirt and tie in pieces, with red paint he acts like being attacked by the cat before the son kills it, "the cats are very dangerous you don´t need to be a hero". The way characters are built put the film very far away from a normal melodrama like Castle of Purity is, we see the intimacy of their games following father's rules, and using those rules to built their own rules to control one another as in real life we all find a way of living inside the institutions.
The washed out over exposed cinematography gave me the sensation of those 70's nature documentaries, and that's what we are looking at: "nature", and a strong thesis; humans can be trained to believe anything, you can construct a society with lies that reinforce the ruling class. The animal nature which is the basis of humans which are in reality incarnated spirits, relies on instincts to survive in this material world, the system can use this instincts to do what it wants with the human will; it does not help to develop consciousness but to hold back humans in the evolutionary chain.
Some violent scenes in different ways remind me of Haneke's films, but in difference they stop when they reach their communicating goal, when their point its clear the film moves on. They are never over the top violent scenes, neither they abuse the audience's endurance, as Haneke often does or worst irresponsible filmmakers like Gaspar Noe who rely on shock value, and don't show a way to light the darkness he submerges the whole theater in. In Dogtooth the point of each scene is clear, sometimes even funny as we see what the filmmaker is criticizing and recognizing our own behavior in this crazy world we live in.
Mom and dad make a great couple who has trained their kids to be the perfect pets, biological machines that are nothing more than an experiment. At certain point one of the daughters is caught performing scenes from the movie Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) or Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, 1983) hilarious moments, the funny thing is that the second scene has some mise en scene elements that are clearly a homage to The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). So Hollywood looks glamorous but at the core is deadly, training people how to kill and take advantage of others; capitalism as a brainwash where no one knows what is the program about, a different reality that is only clear and conscious to the system. When the father caughts her daughter's behavior he punishes her hitting her in the head with the same videocassette that she is imitating but at the same time he enjoys watching porno with his wife.
Dogtooth has many levels and in each of them its a very well done piece of fimmaking, philosophy inside images, the mood it constructs with its very particular montage timing, done with the synergy between wonderful framed compositions and obviously bad ones is genius.

The Mirror (The White Ribbon)

2010-08-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

In Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1990) Laura Palmer was killed in a town that seemed a perfect example of the American dream, wait, she was the perfect girl that everybody loved in that dream or who everybody wanted to dream about. An FBI agent, agent Cooper (Kyle Mac Lachlan) had to come to town trying to discover who the killer was. The killer was never found, a guy called Bob was blamed but he wasn't the killer, evil was the root, orchestrated harm that emanates from the inside out; the whole town was responsible. In The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009) something quite similar happened just before World War I, kids are being punished and abused in strange ways by "someone" of the small community in the peaceful country side. A school teacher (Christian Friedel) is the only one who really seems to want to know who is behind the dark events, at the same time he falls in love with a lovely girl, he and his actions are like the last direct sun light strikes on earth before night devours it.
The black and white cinematography is just spectacular and sober, very enjoyable camera movements are gracious and surprisingly for a Haneke's film, not at all forced (cinematography by Christian Berger). Haneke has reach a very mature level as a filmmaker, most of the time he philosophically comments on the decadence in which our world is submerged in, the problem is that metaphors in film are difficult because film presents a reality, so his films fall to be what he is trying to criticize; but with The White Ribbon is different. He is talking about the history of his country, because Austria used to be part of the third Reich's Germany, now they don't seem to remember. But he talks about this history in a very humbly way, inside it but with an artistic distance that is masterful, he integrates a very balanced work in which for the first time none of its elements seem to lessen the rest.
There is a film called Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson, 1966) in which Jeanne Moreau is a school teacher in a small town, she seems like the perfect new member of the beautiful rural community but privately without no one knowing she performs sadistic individualistic rituals that sublimate her hysteria; she makes enormous fires, poisons the farm animals, brakes the town's dam, etc...
Madmoiselle was shot in gorgeous black and white much more hypnotizing that the film being discussed, it was written by Margarite Duras based on a story by Jean Genet and its a perfect mirror to The White Ribbon in more than just one way. But while its clear that Moreau is the secret destroyer of peace and harmony, in The White Ribbon the answer is that all town is the killer, and every time we know more about the dynamics inside it, it's clearer.

The Little Kid in the Boat (Triangle, 2009)

2010-08-15T04:33:00.000-07:00

Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009) is a lot of movies that you've already seen all mixed together and taken to the extreme, it's a movie that if you are watching on video you'll think about stopping it many times but each time you will find small reasons for not doing it, in this small details is where the good part of the movie lies.
Think about Dead Calm (Phillip Noyce, 1989), The Shinning (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress / J. Mackye Gruber, 2004), Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002) and a lot of other horror and thriller films mixed together in a blend that has nothing new in it but the blend itself.
Jess (a surprisingly good Melissa George) has a problematic son, what's wrong with him? or with her? or with the movie itself? The movie is self conscious, knowing that itself has so many predecessors starts to play with the audience in subtle ways. The combination of the subtle game and the obvious commercial approach of genre creates a synergy that builds up.
Jess goes to a sailing trip to the ocean invited by her friend Greg (Michel Dorman) who invites another couple who invites a female friend trying to hook up with Greg, and a sailor. Soon after leaving land the wind stops and a very strong storm strikes them destroying the ship, they are rescue by an old boat. In its corridors they will find not just horror, but a very sophisticated labyrinthic film structure, repetitions, constant changes of point of view, camera angles that comment the action, dialogues that makes sense after hearing them for more than two times, cliches that are turn into sophistication.
Flirting with being a boring movie the film is surprisingly exciting.
I've seen another movie directed by Christopher Smith before called Severance (2006) it was another genre movie transformed from being just a common slasher into another postmodern experiment with its many details, but remaining to be a slasher.
Postmodern filmmaking that remains commercial for the common viewer, but also daring for the audience who's looking for different stuff. The movie plays with repetitions in different layers, each time using different camera angles that change the discourse completely, Triangle is a movie that can be analyzed in depth and a reflection of what's going on with our world today. Many sides of the story that construct a reality that doesn't make sense in itself, it will only make sense if you can brake up the incoherent pieces that construct the whole puzzle, each piece alone make sense, and we can think about the nature of film itself. The shot is the minimum unity in film, the combination of this units start to build the scene, the combination of scenes builds up a sequence; what happens if we start to brake the structures and glue them inside out?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl , 2009)

2010-05-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

IMDB has Manoel de Oliveira listed as the oldest film director in activity, believe it or not, he´s 98 years old and he continues to shoot movies. The films that I have watched made by him have given me great pleasure, they are sober, full of wisdom but not preachy, beautiful in all sort of ways, surreal in a gently way, they can calm your spirit like only a well written poem can.
Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009)is no exception.
Luisa Vilaca (Catarina Wallenstein) is a beautifully elegant Lolita who sometimes opens the curtains of her apartment, where she lives with her mother, and looks outside. God is in the details and what a detail the fan that she always holds on her hand is, an oriental exquisite piece with a dragon, baby blue filaments dance in the air. Macario (Ricardo Trepa) works as an accountant for his uncle in the building in front of Luisa's window, through his window he contemplates while she fans herself slowly and sometimes looks back at him, he becomes deeply obsessed, looks for her and finally meets her in burgeois gathering where people play a traditional card game while a man recites Fernando Pessoa's poems after a wonderful cello player delights the audience. He starts a courtship much like if it was another century, when Macario wins her heart and wants to marry her, his uncle denies him any support if he tries to do so. Oliveira is adapting a short story from the XIX century, and he doesn't care on trying to find equivalents to this century, he is making a delicate surreal operation in which through farce he depicts men's ridiculous romantic ways, how a superficial attraction in a man's head had been called love for centuries.

From here on I'm going to spoil the movie for the people who haven't seen it for the first time in this blog, I think it's very important to talk about the end, so stop reading if you don't want to find out about the ending.
Macario gets an opportunity to work in Cabo Verde and goes away to make fortune he does so, returns for Luisa and her fan, he even gets his uncle's blessing to marry her. But when they go to find the ring, Luisa gets caught stealing another ring, we instantly recall an event that we thought was insignificant at the beginning of the film, when Luisa and her mother visit the uncle's store some clothe is missing. What follows is just a cold shower over the audience head, I'm not talking about a shocking ending like in 29 Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003), this is a much more sober and in depth anti catharsis that gets us into the character's consciousness representing the human condition and stupidity, maybe even human's nature.
Macario returns the ring, and outside in the street calls Luisa perverse thief, she asks for an opportunity to explain herself, he doesn't listens and only yells at her and tells her to go away. She walks away crying.
That's the end, that's how society still works in this century, he wasn't in love with her it was just a fantasy that wanted to be realized, he only wanted to fan himself with her, a princess on our head like the ultimate commodity. He fought again status, family, economics, he triumph and when he gets the opportunity to fall in love with a human being, he rejects the angel that has become mortal through a failure to be understood so both could transcend together into another dimension. He prefers to be hurt by the porcelain doll broken into pieces, he cuts himself, he cries too.
The camera works using stable, static, well composed shots that are never jarring in any way and that are always balanced compositions that add subtext to the seriousness of the criticism of men's facade, the facade of status quo, the facade of not wanting to feel the real feelings. The elegance of the color palette helps our eye to relax and flow following Macario in this existential trip with a stupid climax or the climax of stupidity.

Little Buddha (Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, 2007)

2010-05-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

Besides being one of the most talented Iranian filmmakers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is the father of three filmmakers that are having a lot of success in international film festivals around the world:

http://www.makhmalbaf.com

It was a peculiar case that Samira made her first film at 20 years old, The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998), but even more peculiar was the gossip about her younger sister's Hana "making of movie" about Samira's third film: At Five in the Afternoon (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2003), being even better than the film itself, Hana was only 15 years old.

Now finally we got a chance in Mexico to check out her first feature film, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf, 2007) made when she was only 18 years old.

Baktay is a little girl who is taking care of her baby brother, but when she sees her neighbor studying for school she desperately wants to go to school too. She needs a notebook so she ties her baby brother and takes 4 of her mother's eggs to sell at the market, without any luck she gets some bread from a woman so she can sell and get the notebook but not enough money to get a pen, she is planning on using mother's lipstick. She tries to go to the boys school but she is kick out for being a woman, when she goes looking for the girl's school some kids playing taliban kidnap her.

The film is consciously in debt with the great master Abbas Kiarostami. The whole first part of the little girl trying to get the notebook to get to school is a rework on Where is my Friend's House (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987), there are space and montage notions from other Kiarostami filmography, even a homage to his short film about the kid who is afraid of the dog. Its very surprising that a young filmmaker has postmodern notions and she works inside the intertextuality of her own country's filmography. It's surprising how graciously she embraces the digital technologies, she sacrifices a beautiful image for the message she is trying to get across.

Hana is very practical with her cutaway shots between the kids playing to make war, she makes her point clear: "violence is a social germ that gets around through imitation". But what is much more effective is the tension she creates on the audience inside the game, Baktay gets kidnap and the boys are planning on throwing stones at her, is it really going to happen? Are they going to kill her or is just a game?
What is funny is that later the kids appear again and they are now playing to be CIA agents looking for terrorists. Subtlety in the kingdom of the non actors.

The film is shot in Afghanistan, where the huge Buddha statues where exploded by the taliban some years ago, her characters live in caves made where the Buddhas use to stand. Hana learning well from her father's generation of filmmakers cuts to the moment of the explosion of the Buddhas during the course of the fiction effectively.

Hana creates unforgettable digital beautiful moments again and again: hand held over the shoulder of a girl dress in green walking besides a crack on the mountain while yelling at her mother that she is falling to get her attention. A little kid falling into other kid's trap of mud and being menace by them with sticks as guns, later he walks all brown with the dry mud all over his body. Paper bags with holes for eyes and mouth, they first appear when the kids are kidnap and later on adults who work and don't pay attention to this kids games use them. Hana and other girls painting themselves with lipstick until the teacher finds out and yells at them.

If Hana is shooting like this when she was 18 let's see what she does later on.

Encounter with the Brief (The Green Zone, 2010)

2010-04-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

Last night I went with someone to see the last Steve Carrell movie, we tried to pay but the multiplex structure didn’t let us, afterwards we saw another film for free (there is no excuse for this last action). The film already had started and Matt Damon was in it, it was a huge budget war film; I was sure that we were going to be there for a short while but we stayed for the whole film. It was an impeccable done film, the enormous budget seem every moment to grow bigger, Iraq was being reconstructed on the screen so it could be destroyed one more time. How many second units? Was the question. I thought about who could be directing this? Tony Scott?, couldn’t be there was a political message that was coming up to the surface and it was coming up in an elegant way so it was neither a Spielberg’s. At the end the mystery was solved: English director Paul Greengrass was in command of the enormous Hollywood war machine toy, and my impression got further after learning that the film locations were in Morocco, Spain and England. The paraphernalia is so excessive that for example we are getting a close up of Matt Damon talking inside a vehicle which is moving and a plane crash is constructed in the background just so we have something to be amused by when the camera pans to the person who he is talking to.

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010) is the use of Hollywood, meaning cinema as a political industry with all its excesses, its ridicule means, its power, its technical efficiency to translate a truth to the common people: We started this war with lies, we said there were some nuclear weapons that never existed, and guess what? we may do it again. Just remember that when the people knows the truth then the state has to come up with another excuse, and now its more difficult to win back trust after loosing it. The trick is to justify, who’s talking? You can use something that is already said, something that made money, a best seller like in this case Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book. Hollywood is a machine and you can use it as you wish, you only have to follow its rules so you can get somewhere else. Its clear that director Greengrass has a political consciousness, he had been making big blockbusters movies, learning to use the huge Hollywood war film toy (this is no Bourne’s trilogy let me tell you) but you have to use Matt Damon, get the message across via mainstream, at the same time using a very well established director/actor relationship.

Chief Miller is a good soldier, he's looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) defending the democracy in which he believes so much, he is sent on some missions into creepy places where he doesn’t find a thing, he starts to get suspicious and after following many clues he understands that there are no weapons and maybe Washington always knew so.

With a scene full of gunshots in medium shots that could be part of any high art action movie of the new American filmmaking from the 70’s, thinking Friedkin, Pakula or Penn. Fun to watch virtuous choreographies between dozens of cameras some from the air, some virtual in a electric devise, many variations at ground level. Magnificent rhythm that takes your breath away with wild cutting, a fight between commanders from different platoons tightly shot is suddenly cut away, helping you to breath in, with a wide shot of the Iraqi character running away with a mcguffin, it’s a wide shot but he also is dress in pink making a harmonic panning over the brown and dusty desert’s sand. All is planned, well done, and very but very expensive. Greengrass makes a political statement dress as an action war film, he translates for the common people what happened during the Bush administration that still is going on and that maybe will go on over more Arabic countries. He does so fully dominating the genre language, making a suspenseful, well cast blockbuster Sunday movie, full of violence and action, that will get to the mass in any shopping mall while they eat their popcorn.

About the Steve Carrell movie, well I said I wasn’t going to write badly about any film at certain point in the evolution of this blog, I’m not going to, but I already started to talk about it. So if you want to see After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985) directed but specially written by a three year old, but also want to experience how two excellent actors (Tina Fey who has become legendary by her impersonation of Sarah Palin in the Saturday Night Live TV show and Carrell) make a perfect chemical connection on the screen turn every bad joke into a opportunity to perform magic, constructing fantastic moments, hilarious beats (you’ll find yourself laughing about scenes that if they were played by other actors you would even maybe cry) then go check out Date Night (Shawn Levy, 2010).

The Music Of Razoo / Victory Days (a commentary by Chris Manz)

2010-04-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

I asked Chris Manz specifically about the music of Razoo / Victory Days, and he wrote me back beautiful words as always:

Well I did make one mention of the music in my letter (and it is important to remember that I wrote it specifically for you--not as a comprehensive essay about the complete works themselves; although I am still flattered that you thought it good enough to publish in your blog), and that was how the music tended to get more chromatic/dissonant whenever the object of make-up was introduced. In terms of the music--I do not dislike it. The music is kind of this post-rock/ambient/post-krautrock thing that is built on repetition. (I first discovered music like this through bands like Mogwai and Slint as a kid--but when as I entered college I learned about Brian Eno, The Durutti Column, Neu and their precursors) I think the music does help to establish a definite tone to your movies. And good conventional uses of movie soundtracks are unconscious, so can't it only be seen as a compliment that I do not refer to it directly? Your pieces are cohesive and have a distinct tone--naturally the music plays an important roll in this achievement.

Now I do not know if you are asking me if I would choose to listen to the music on its own--but I do not think you are since it was not created for this purpose. This music is a sonic backbone for a series of images. And their integration is seamless. Amd we are discussing a movie--not a music video...

In all of this I feel that I should point out that I discovered my first favorite filmmaker primarily as a result of his unconventional use of soundtrack--and that was Peter Greenaway. Obviously I had seen films by Orson Welles, Hitchcock, etc. before then. I recognized what a director was but I didn't really care. But after I saw my first Peter Greenaway film I immediately went out and bought all of the other ones released at the time on VHS. I would re-watch them (often not understanding his various references, intellectual catalogues, etc). But when Nyman's familiar baroque themes would appear at choice moments (hell even at moments that did not seem significant to the story) I felt a rush of emotion. Here was an approach to filmmaking that I found fresh and exciting. The music almost seemed to drive the film! Yet the films themselves were very multifaceted in their layered narratives and images. But I know I would not have become a fan of Greenaway if they were without Nyman's spectacular soundtracks--they simply would not have been the same movies. This is why I did not like later films Greenaway did without him (he went back to Brian Eno who made soundtracks that I did not care about). I bought that boxset of very early Greenaway films, he started as a structuralist filmmaker (and arguably retained that approach even through his narrative period). These early film are sometimes clever--but often boring without their needed musical counterpart.

Incidentally, while Le Mepris is not my favorite film by Godard, it is one that makes me feel the most emotion--because of that goddamn soundtrack! The theme is so beautiful and in your face. That theme swells for the first time as the camera turns to follow the assistant character simply walking along a desolate wall. But plain image, but so loaded for me because of the soundtrack--I am instantly sentimental! But again Godard made this as his Hollywood movie. He is consciously using these conventions to manipulate. I am manipulated by these tactics.

Now I mention these examples not to say that they are a better approaches to using a soundtrack--but they put the music on display! One cannot help but notice the music then. It is not an accordant bed that the images evenly layer upon. The music is composed to be front in center. That is why I even notice them! BUT that is also why I often notice them more than the film images themselves.

So again the music in your movies work very well for your purpose. The music does illicit feelings that are not found alone simply among the images that you shot and assembled. But at the same time the music in your movies is subtle and made to support the images.

Chris Manz

RAZOO / VICTORY DAYS (Psicogram, 2010)

2010-04-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

We just finished the new video for the PSICOGRAM project, its called

Razoo / Victory Days

Its name comes from the combination of the words Rabbit and Zoo, but for me is also a new word: the zoo of ancient Egyptian sun god RA.

In Spanish we get a third word, Raso: the member of the military forces who has just become a soldier and occupies the lesser scale. Victory Days is the name of the original song that Fonogram (the other part of the project) worked in such an interesting way for the piece. The lyrics of that song talked about the small victories that an artist can get when he triumphs over his ego against the people who run the art circuits around the world and don´t let the real artists come out. The performer finds out that the real triumph is internal and finally becomes an artist after letting go of success as he bought it since being a child, he no longer wants to be on the cover of a magazine, as I understand the song.

My very good friend Chris Manz who lives in Boston wrote the next email just for me and without knowing that it was going to be publicised in this blog, I hope that he doesn't get mad.

So Chris wrote>

I watched Razoo / Victory Days as soon as you had sent me an email with the link. But I could not respond then because I recognized some themes from Andrea & Andrea that I wanted to mention. I knew that I had to re-watch A&A again in order to make certain comments.

As always I am fascinated by your assemblages of images and its exploration of meaning. Shall I tell you that I like it? I do not always know what to feel afterwards; I think this question is a bit meaningless when it comes to talking about your work (but if you must know--then yes, I did like it since I just re-watched it now again).

Ok then my response. Well I feel like both of these works are dealing with an externalized existentialism. A search for some kind of meaning among a similar physical landscape (in Andrea & Andrea unconscious--in Razoo clearly deliberate).

Andrea & Andrea is an oblivious journey. It is a document of youth almost unaware of itself. In this film these girls are continually eclipsed by the sun (often in silhouette). This offers a seemingly hint of mortality (the end) to the audience that goes unnoticed by the young girls in the video--as it should.

We see these girls enjoy themselves in their leisure time. One motif that begins here and reoccurs in Razoo is the use of make-up. Its entrance always seems prompt musical dissonance in the soundtrack. In A&A make-up is a tool of conformity. Something that "girls do." Its traditional purpose is to help make women more attractive in nearly all cultures. It is expected that they use it--and a woman feels better about herself when she is seen as beautiful. Obviously make-up is used to achieve a completely different end in Razoo since it is first of all a very deliberate action (not routine). And it is used to break with the expectation of a social role (the business man). Sure both uses do conceal the subjects in some way, create masks, etc. but for totally different reasons.

In A&A there is no overt reflection (mentally in the characters or visually in the film style). The girls are either absorbed in conversation with each other, the attention of other men, or their own fleeting thoughts as they eat candy. And we never see distress on either of their faces in these moments.

In both films the main subject(s) wander on an undefined journey through a landscape that is constructed for the purposes of diversion/entertainment (a park/carnival distraction setting).
It is difficult to explicitly address how the subjects in both films preoccupy themselves with "commodities" for large amounts of time since we only see one financial transaction--when the girls first purchase a milkshake. So we see objects of entertainment for sale but never their acquirement through these means.

The next motif that is introduced in A&A that reoccurs in Razoo is refreshment (a sweet drink). In A&A it causes sensual pleasure. This is then further extended as the two girls consume candy and other sweets. (In Razoo the found, partially-consumed drink is NOT consumed for pleasure. In fact it causes the subject to feel at first repelled since he is literally drinking someone else's drink).

By the end of A&A the day has nearly ended. It was enjoyed without reflection (as youth so often is).
In Razoo / Victory Days we are immediately introduced to a subject who has a suggested objective (this is conveyed through his business attire and the expressions of impatience on his face which communicate that he is trying to get to a specific location as quickly as possible).

Once out of his car, our subject not only sees his surrounding landscape but he closely analyzes it. While Andrea and Andrea are visually oppressed by the sun (perhaps symbolizing human time and each individuals inferior position and relationship to Life itself) but remain unaware, the man in Razoo literally faces off with his surroundings and finds defeat.

He only enters one interior during the video (a hotel--I don't count the aquarium at the end as functioning this way) where he finds two young girls at a desk who do not look dissimilar to Andrea & Andrea. These girls are subtly concealed by shadow (again like in A&A).

Well our subject is cast back out into the world and finds himself next in another escapist outdoor landscape. While our subject has discernibly reflected mentally about his circumstances prior to this point, we now see a visual representation of reflection as he tries on sunglasses in a mirror. But then something strange happens. As he goes to take off the sunglasses he is trying on, the mirror he is holding trembles. When it swings back he is wearing sunglasses that he has not chosen to put on. This refers to an inherent prejudice (or metaphorical blindness) that he is not aware of at this point. I (Chris) now begin to see the expressions of distress from earlier in the video as something larger--an existential dread. (Almost a nausea?). Well our subject then literally makes himself nauseas by drinking the sun-cooked remainder of someone else's refreshment left on a table.

After this a musical cue of dissonance. This can only mean one thing--make-up! Only this time the soundtrack is far more subtle (almost imperceptible). In Andrea & Andrea the musical dissonance was clearly pronounced since the subjects apply make-up out of instinct. In Razoo our subject is making a conscious break with general expectations of his social role with his use of make-up. So the dissonant music cue is unconscious. The make-up here is used as a mask purposely (not a mask of illusion--such as seemingly natural make-up worn by many women).

Now our subject enjoys a moment of seeming liberation. He acts without regard for propriety as he let himself go. Now the paradoxical image of water is introduced into the work. Our subject blows bubbles (a manufactured, seemingly controllable form of water) over a body of water. But there are more layers as the body of water underneath is an aqueduct--it is man made. It does not flow as natural water flows--for it is constrained. A similar paradox accompanies the bubble blowing. It looks as though our subject has power (or control) over the formation and distribution of the bubbles. But it is not he not alone who decides the destination for these particles--he is collaborating with the wind.

Now for the introduction of another important image: a bridge. Our subject first looks as though he might traverse the large body of water, but as he approaches he literally enters a prison. The stream of life underneath is false! So instead he turns the opposite direction and begins to consciously perform. He is free within himself by not being himself. This only lasts a moment.

The Mayan calendar is an instrument that measures time based on observable phenomena. As our subject replaces the frame with his painted face (and newly acquired composure by turning his attention and actions directly outward) he begins to become a perceptible representation of time itself.

The notion of one personal Identity changes--as exemplified by the image of the woman bearing her name as a tattoo on her back--a literally superficial depiction.
Our subject now finds peace for the first time by giving up his command over all: a trolley carries him as he holds a pinwheel which is animated by wind. He no longer seeks to control--as that is prison in itself.

He sits at a water fountain (another human construction containing water). The water filling the fountain is completely still. Then we experience an inversion. With one edit--the video becomes a reflection. But it is not a focused reflection motivated by a personal perspective (such as when our subject examined himself in the mirror before while trying on sunglasses). The outside world (free from character perspective) is reflected in the water. Our subject is playful with the reflection which as he goes to chase a fish. His image becomes a silhouette in the water (much like the previous late afternoon of Andrea & Andrea). The major difference is that life unreflected (e.g. the sun) was what caused the shadow images of Andrea & Andrea. The subject of Razoo, however, finds his shadow where it is authentically apart of a genuine reflection.

The subject then observes animals in various forms of containment. But life itself is a prison in some form--whether one is physically contained, mentally, emotionally. That's why peace and freedom can only be achieved by allowing things to be as they are. To fight or try to control at all is to try to fight and control an illusion. This can only result in pain and deeper self-deception.

Once again the pinwheel, blown by breeze, reminds us of this very principle. As our subject continues his life journey with his newly acquired wisdom he comes literally face to face with a mime--a physical human being imitating a physical human being.

Chris Manz

Here's the link for the video, in there you can also find the Andrea & Andrea video that he refers to, the first Psicogram piece

http://vimeo.com/10826960

one more for the show that Chris used to have back in California where we met, I helped him with some camera work now and then

http://www.chrismanzshow.com/

other one for his new project, which I saw and I'm waiting to see more so I can have an opinion that I hope he doesn't put on a blog, but that's not his style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B1EgDFU07c

and another one for Fonogram music

http://www.myspace.com/vglanda

Father and Son (The Road, 2009)

2010-02-27T14:34:00.000-08:00

The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009) is the sci-fi film that has the ingredients to be really terrorific, not constructing the entire frame of a new future but using what we know to build a lesson about men wrong turns. For example films like Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) that work with ambiguity in terms of being almost contemporary with violence around the corner using an ancient component, the tribe, as in William Holding's "Lord of the Flies", group of kids that in order to survive follow a leader that helps them to let out all the "shadows" that society represses in them, darkness rises up when the system closes his eyes. Films like The Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968) where humans run naked in fields returning to an age when even the knowledge of seeding was nonexistent. But The Road makes me really remember the horror that Michael Haneke expose us on The Time of the Wolf (2003), where normal people with the same clothes that we use now a days but dirty, overused (the only change left), thirsty without having any water to drink from, using public places as collective hideouts, not separating ourselves from reality with futuristic transportation but once again back to the basics with horses, where the exchanges of commodities is the only coin, where the enemy could be your own family or people you know.
A father (Viggo Mortensen) is walking through some cities in the now devastated US with his little son (Kodi Smit McPhee) with the help of pieces of a road map, they have no food and no food or water to be found, no shinny days (literary an overcast reality) to enjoy, and almost no humans in sight. If you are a normal person you wouldn't be dying to meet someone in this new country because cannibalistic practices are going on with a tribal structure. There is a scene that plays graciously reminding us of Daniel Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe, combining it visually with Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972).
The nightmarish world that director Hillcoat builds rests on a gritty realistic approach in front of his lens that only makes it more real, with an instant intertextuality that reaches films like Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) in which Greg Toland showed that film could be even more crude than reality.
Father is haunted by memories of his wife (Charlize Theron) but in a past that is almost no better than their present, the starting point of the world crisis? The family is already secluded in their own house before things went really ugly, just before running out of food, water and without electric energy, still looking normal; but mom is not hanging on she's loosing it, finally committing suicide with dad's own approval. His only reason to keep it going is his son, and he has a gun with two bullets ready if things get wrong in this world one for his son first the second one for himself.
One can argue that The Road is one of the movies that we don't really need, showing the dark face of the prophecy that is almost arriving; but I think that a film so well done in so many ways is helpful for people to understand that things getting ugly or beautiful only depend on us, which kind of new era are we hoping for? Let's show it with our way of living the present. The son helps his father to show some of the virtues that he tought him, the most important if them all: Sympathy.

Mom, step away (Precious, 2009)

2010-02-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009) is the balance that contemporary American indie filmmaking is in need for, half of it is made with an expressionistic lens use, sophisticated color pallette, jarring compositions, lyrically expressive but realistic (almost not) art directing. The other half is well developed characters, strong story structure, and amazing scenes with excellent performances.

Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) is a young female again pregnant by his own father, she is obese, with not a trace of self respect, and exploited and abused everyday by her own mother:Mary (Mo´Nique) who throws things at her, asks for cooked food at midnight and then changes her mind and forces Precious to eat it after she had dinner and is already full, and claims her for stealing her man, after she didn't protect her of him. Precious joins a special school where she meets Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) who will help her a lot to see who she really is, and find a way out to this madness, helped by wonderful classmates who will become her first friends in life.

Lee Daniels had produced a very successful movie before, Monster's Ball (Marc Forster, 2001) and when he directed his debut feature, Shadowboxer (2005) confused everybody. It was an over the top very expressive film without soul, a carnival of eccentric colorful style. Precious has what was missing in that film without loosing its brave imaginary. Precious character is pathetic but truthful, full of life, even fun. She is likeable because of her enormous heart in a very tight script, with even better directed scenes like the one of Precious stealing the bucket of chicken, or slapping the kid in the street after fighting her mother, or attacking her classmate when she makes fun of her. She developes a relationship with a social worker, Mrs. Weiss, who is surprisingly incarnated by the pop singer Mariah Carey. Mrs. Weiss makes Precious face her situation, her reality and her slave master, her own mother Mary.
Precious redeems herself with the help of love, strong actions that wakes her up, she accepts her karma but also closes the circle, entering a new samsara, a better one. Travels through hell to find her own heaven.

The DP is Andrew Dunn who had worked before in huge commercial triumphs, he lends his talent this time to Lee Daniels who uses the camera as a painter uses a brush, the film is personal and at the same time open for common audiences, proof of this is the commercial success. If the Oscar ceremony was only about real talent and serious filmmaking, then the Cohen brothers would sustain a strong match against Lee Daniels for the best director's award, helped in both cases by amazing collaborations. Both films have something in common besides being examples of the film medium as a collective art form of endless potential, both use melodrama to arrive to strange new lands, places that haven´t been explored before in such a depth.

Getting Real (Up in the Air)

2010-01-24T15:53:00.000-08:00

I saw Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2005) in a Q & A screening with the director, I have always had trouble with the sons of good directors who just inherit the success of the father without a self merit or talent. Ivan Reitman is a very good commercial director, but his son is even better, he pays real attention to the details and that's where the game is being played.
Didn't like so much that first movie, but it was smart, well done and with a certain sensibility. Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) made obvious his talent, but Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009) is much more of a serious film. Well developed characters, not only establishing a situation/conflict that perfectly reflects our times but uses it to go deeper inside human philosophical issues, it has an impeccable manufacture, it's fun, and what is more important: "It deeply questions", not only how our society works today but also reflects different ways of living life inside this huge new world factory.
Ryan Bingham's (George Clooney, I'm not a fan but he is extremely good in this one) job is as he puts it, to live inside airplanes and airports, so he can get to a different place of the US and fire someone from his job in a clean way. In a certain bar of a certain hotel in a certain town he meets his feminine double, Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga). They discuss about what's the best car rental company, then compare membership cards, and finally go to bed together. They start to see each other in places they seem to be at the same time, without developing a relationship, it's kind of implicitly forbidden. Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) a very intelligent woman but also young, starts to work for Ryan's company, she introduces a whole new way of making the firing job through the internet, from a distance. Ryan gets very angry not just because his world is gonna change completely, no more travel for him, but because he realizes that the whole purpose of his job was to help people understand and face his new situation, now is just a matter of turning on a Youtube channel to get fired. His new job is to travel with Natalie to show her the real thing from town to town.
He'll soon accept that this is just another part of the same machine that everyday controls society more and more, he will make himself the protocol question that he asks to the people he fires, when did you turn your back to your dreams?
He will wake up in relationship terms, in family terms, in friendship terms, he will definitely wake up.
Reitman has been shooting modern fables for a while and this one is the most balanced and tonally matched, it reminds me of Capra's or Sturges' social comedies; he also elegantly uses the film medium to talk about a tough situation going on. He even incorporates real documentary footage of people who got fired from jobs in which they had work for a long time. The US crisis is approached in a mature way, it's seen through many point of views, and not only using the cold glasses of the dark humor, neither being condescending.

What should I do with this? (The Hurt Locker)

2010-01-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009) is hard to define, it will tear down all your expectations if your are looking for an action war film, or a straight explanation on real events that happened during Iraq's conflict, even if it's based in a screenplay from a writer who was in Iraq as a journalist, Mark Boal.
Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is sent to lead an elite bomb disposal unit in the conflict after the last leader died in a mission, Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) were witness of the tragedy. James is an adrenaline addict, he is just in those missions to put himself in dangerous situations, when Sanborn and Eldrige discover his procedures and see the futility of all these, and the part of danger that is distrubuted to themselves, they start to hate him.
I tried to put the plot into a certain structre, but the truth is that the virtue of this film is that it seems more like an unstructured documentary than a fictional feature, the level of reality created in here is astounding, the film was shot in Amman, Jordan where no war is happening. The talent of Mrs. Bigelow, the best female action director, is used to capture fragments of this conflict that give our perception a new place to be, building an analytical place to abstractly think about the male testosterone driven violent nature as a huge component on making wars that just escapes our normal point of view because of being too obvious. Bigelow just undresses the film of its dramatic clothes, she is not interested in creating empathy or any other Hollywood screenwriting element and just elaborates into a philosophical reflection. The film doesn't really holds up because of a strong conflict, if you look for it is inside the protagonist and very difficult to figure out, so the main conflict is about war logistics, or better said lack of them, and the absurdities of it. In a certain part of the film, at the dorms drinking straight from the Jack Daniel's bottle, Sanborn and James are playing a game: hitting the other one by turns in the stomach, the other one has to put his body there wait and suffer, and then is the turn of the other one to do the same, in another part of the movie Eldrige is playing a video game killing everybody he finds in his way, we'll soon see him outside with the same attitude towards normal human beings. So is it war just an activity in result of a male driven world who doesn't know what to do with their testosterone? it isn't funny though.
An excellent part of the film which gets close to a dramatic developing but doesn't really puts a lot of effort into it, is how James starts a human relationship (normally he just opens himself with bombs) with a little boy who sells pirate dvds, after he just suspects that the kid was used as a human bomb, he goes out and tries to save him. When he later discovers that he wasn't the one turn into a bomb, in that moment James finds out about caring, a feeling he doesn't have even for his girl and child waiting for him home in company of his cable TV.

The movies for the dead, by the dead, are more alive than ever (Zombieland)

2010-01-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

The zombie movie sub-genre as we know it was born in the wild night's that George A. Romero spent being a young filmmaker, looking for a first feature to make. Wine in the stomach, smoke in the air in those parties with his colleagues to find an original idea, something that hasn't been done, or presented in a new way. The result was Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 68), and also success with many sequels. Lucio Fulci took the zombie movie to its limits, being too serious and also too gross in the 70's and 80's. In 1978 with Dawn of the Dead, Romero hint the way that the sub-genre could only go into: comedy, being a satire of our consumer society with many lyrical landscapes. Dan O'Bannon, the screenwriter of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), came up with a hilarious full length zombie comedy feature film in 1985, The Return of the Living Dead, respecting the Romero commandments. Taking it further on that direction and after the video that John Landis made for Michel Jackson for the Thriller song in 1983, Takashi Miike made a whole musical zombie comedy film, also hilarious, The Happiness of the Katakuris, in the year 2001. 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) shown how diverse is the expressive director coming from Manchester and also that the zombie flicks were very alive in this new century, a theme that comes naturally in our everyday life, that can also be still successful in its serious form. Some years ago came the very successful Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) and last year we had many laughs to finish up the year with ZOMBIELAND (Ruben Fleischer, 2009).

This is by no means a real chronological map of the sub-genre and a lot of information and films are missing, is just a personal analysis made by memory figuring out this article.
Zombieland is not just a postmodern Zombie flick, it also manages film intertextuality as an internet poem made by users comments that analyzes the nature of film and perception, a fun film that remaining blockbuster hit also questions our times in a cute way.
For example, Tallahassee is a reinterpretation of Mickey Knox by the same actor: Woody Harrelson, but this time he is not in love with Mallory (Juliette Lewis) but with a twinkie, he even knows how they call them down in Mexico: "Submarinos".
In one of the best parts of the film, the characters go into Bill Murray's mansion and Bill Murray appears pretending that he is a Zombie, but he is also inside the screen because Ghost Busters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) is being projected.

Some former fellow students at the Master's film program that I attended in California, came up last year with and idea for a Webseries about Zombies. They didn't stop and produced it with their own means with almost a nonexistent budget, the show is great check it out:

http://www.semi-dead.com/

Cheers guys!!!

Rebuilding a Kingdom (Funny People)

2010-01-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

Adam Sandler is another good actor that most of the time makes crappy movies, although he's one of those that turns cliche flicks into something else, he has the magic that all actors had in the 40's, the mojo for the screen that is hard to find now a days. He really surprised me when he built Barry Egan character in Punch-Drunk Love (P.T Anderson, 2002) and ran hand with hand with Emily Watson, at her height and in some scenes even better tan her.
On the other hand Judd Apatow has become the Henry Ford of the film industry, building a huge enterprise with his own seal that many people are trying to copy now. I thought that the formula was gonna wear off fast, The 40 Year Old Virgin (Apatow, 2005) was just a question of luck? I was wrong and FUNNY PEOPLE (Apatow, 2009) is the evidence that his movies are just getting better, specially the ones that he gets to direct. Most of the ones that he just produces are kind of lame but good though, and we immediately see a constant that happens with people who built successful enterprises: "He is loyal to his family"; a group of actors that he keeps on discovering are populating his films. He seems like the missing link between Jerry Lewis and Mel Brooks, a Woody Allen bought at a bending machine.
George Simmons (Adam Sandler) a huge comic figure that built himself (as most of the 80's crew) doing stand up comedy, is facing a crisis, a doctor detects that he has cancer and he is going to die, but that's not really the crisis. His real crisis is opening his eyes to the superficial life that he has been living for the past decades, checking out his life and all the missing opportunities to become a real human being, now he is alone with all his toys. Because of his sickness he shares his kingdom with a nobody who is just starting in the stand up circuit, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen). Having a human being in his mansion, working with him his jokes just start to open his eyes and of course he is not delighted with what he starts to see.
Funny People is rebuilding a kingdom without a war, changing the old tiles for colored ones, a changing of habits, the death card in a tarot deck.
What is lacking in the movies that Apatow produces and doesn't gets to direct is his eyes, because he has a very good one, the talent to make look simple what in TV directing and most conventional Hollywood looks artificial and arranged. Adam Sandler is a perfect king for this kingdom, what happened before with Steve Carrell was the jump of an excellent TV actor into Hollywood stardom, but what happens with a Hollywood star being directed into a very well developed setting, character and atmosphere?
The scenes are not just funny, they built up into and emotional map that goes inside the viewer affecting his deeper regions, the unexplored ones for the common Hollywood audience, affecting him much more deeper than what he thought he was going to get affected; an amazing melodrama that builds a mirror to the spectator's ambitions and what he really has that he hasn't seen.
Some can say that Apatow´s films are childish and brainless, full of scatological material and inappropriate language, mainly composed of people swearing as high school dudes, and you know what? They are right. But as films made by a child they are done with a heart.

If My Mother Is Dead, Why Can I Speak With Her? (Genova)

2009-12-01T11:06:00.000-08:00

I have always liked Colin Firth, not just because he builds characters full of depth for light movies like Bridget Jones' Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001), or Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) and he brings certain simplicity in complex portraits like in Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan, 2005). I didn't know why did I liked him so much until I saw Genova (Michael Winterbottom, 2008), and it is because he is very good actor. Working this time with an excellent director ready for checking the smallest details, who works in a very peculiar way that gives actors more freedom and also more comfort let him go ahead of what he had been doing until now.
Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) and Kelly (Willa Holland) are playing to close their eyes and guess the color of the car that is coming next while Marianne (Hope Davis) her mother drives, until Mary puts her hands over her mother's eyes, trying to make her part of the game, closing them forever in a tragic accident. Joe (Colin Firth) decides to escape to Genova in Italy, continue teaching there and try to survive with his two daughters. Mary guiltiness comes out in nightmares, wet bed incidents but also through her perception in which she can see Marianne. alive. Marianne talks to her, walks her around, and Mary draws her in many colors. Kelly's pain and hate comes out in an outrageous teenager conduct that puts her in dangerous situations that forces conflict with Joe. The three of them have to find out in a very sorrowful way that the only exit from their grief comes between each member of the family to each other forming again a family.
Winterbottom has always been a very interesting director because he switches genres, style, themes as he changes clothes everyday, but sometimes he is a little bit cold in his gaze toward his characters (even when he made Angelina Jolie act like never before, well before Eastwood), sometimes he relays more in technical gadgets, but this time he has a 10. Winterbottom plays it straight, and he just shoots this roller coaster of emotions in a very expressive environment that counterbalances his theme in a very interesting way. The city of Genova has always been a very iconographic place, it has inspired artists like Hayao Miyazaki to write and draw specifically with the city in mind. Winterbottom plays with the notions of the participants background and the one of the city, in terms of social behavior, but he also uses space sometimes as an extension of the characters psyche, sometimes as a challenge to character's objectives, as a counter point of him and his thoughts and feeling, also as a motive for certain scene's content in a musically pictoric way.

Far Away Trains Passing By (35 Shots of Rum)

2009-12-01T07:23:00.000-08:00

Lionel (Alex Descas) and Josephine (Mati Diop) live like husband and wife, but she´s his daughter and she´s lovely. Their neighbor Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is fighting long before the movie starts to be the new mom, but that´s not going to happen. Up in the disordered penthouse lives, who seems wanting to catch up with life but having much trouble in the operation, Noé (Gregoire Colin); Mati is in love with him, he with her and both are going to find it out soon.
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2009) seems like a fragmentated slice of life vérité, with very good actors who pass as regular people, of what it is to live in France as a minority. It´s a life manifesto as do it yourself model, find your own happiness in the small details, keep on going non stop you are very close.
The actors directing in this film is outstanding, veteran Claire Denis (who started once upon a time 1st ADing masters like Wenders in his mystic "where did I left my family" desert elegy, París, Texas (1984); or Jarmusch absurd whereabouts in the Louisiana swamps: Down by Law (1986) and even before Dusan Makavejev's crazy meditations, instant cult classic Sweet Movie (1974) ) gives us exceptional lessons on how to build a reality for the screen.
Very few films now a days have the power to take me out of the theater context and enter a reality that I don´t know about. I have to accept that in some scenes I forgot I was watching a projection in celluloid and surprised myself inside a reality outside of mine, enjoying the feeling of being someone that just sits there and watches a display of emotions, words, phrases, gazes, touches, even smells. Much has to do with the actors interaction under an elegant cinematography that is so simple by Agnes Godard who works again with Denis, as well as a soundtrack that just gives an extra to certain moments that we need to go inside some character´s world, also from constant collaborators: Tindersticks.
The film is more about what is left out of frame - screenplay, the story appears in our mind and not in the screen with details that are not dramatic as the ones in our mind fiction reality that Denis wants us to imagine.

A good scene is better than a thousand movies without a heart:

Joan of Arc does Paris ( Hadewijch, 2009)

2009-11-16T07:34:00.000-08:00

Last night I went with a friend to watch Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, 2009) and I was asked about the nature of Dumont´s work. I answered that there is a constant in his work, he analyze the macro cosmos through the micro cosmos, he dissects the global system that we live in just taking a small portion of it, almost a marginal sample that its much stronger to talk about the whole. A character in a small town, or in his little nucleus (family, lover, friends), how are these characters affected by the whole; their consumption, their productivity, their arrangement in space, their not existing philosophy, their faith, their moral values, Hadewijch is not an exception.
Céline (Julie Skolowski) a contemporary Joan of Arc, suffers because she can't stop God's call, she lives in a monastery with nuns but she follows her own rules that go far ahead of what the nuns ask from her; the mother superior puts her back in her own life out of the convent so she can think, accusing her of pride.
Céline returns home to the fancy home where her parents don't care about each other or her, just ask a lot of questions, dad lives his work addiction and mom her physical one to painkillers that we never see on frame. Céline goes out to a coffee shop and meets a group of Muslim teenagers and becomes friends with one who shows her the Muslim faith. She instantly makes a huge click with their fanaticism that goes along with her own. Lovely scenes of her praying with her rosary while her Muslim counterparts do their own ritual, shoulder to shoulder, not only respecting but breaking cultural walls.
Why is it that human kind only can communicate reaching crazy states of mind, or when we need the help of other to perform a crime even if is in name of God?
The cinematography is amazing, you don't perceive it in an intellectual way you just feel it, it's like a style of a writer when he chooses his words and make such an enormous difference, Yves Cape is the responsible for almost all Dumont's dreams imaginary (excepting the thrilling 29 Palms). Cold lighting that just goes perfect with the shallow framing, but the relation of the actress to the camera axis is ultra expressive remaining cold as metal, extreme close ups that immediately correlates her with Maria Falconetti's angelic face in Dreyer's classic. The almost nonexistent strong back lighting that just builds the dream. The saturation of the green in Hadewijch's fields contrasting with what the characters are wearing, the brown of the trees without leaves appears like prison bars of the faith. The grays outside, the grays that constitutes Paris outskirts, the forgotten Paris, contrasting with the fake gold of that money can buy inside Céline's parents house.
The only thing that this little girl needed all the time to flourish, was love, but love is so far that we need to believe it only exist in heaven.

Money Talks (The Silence of Lorna, 2008)

2009-11-15T18:29:00.000-08:00

The Dardenne brothers are not my favorite taste in what has to be with filmmaking style, discourse, and aesthetics, I think they rely too much on representation, but I have to say that I respect their non stop violent attack on the brutal economic system that rules the world.
I just saw The Silence of Lorna (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2008) which won the screenwriting award in Cannes (they collect awards from this festival as stickers), and I have to say that it's the most interesting film that I have seen from them.
I appreciate a lot their game in this one, besides making a Dardenne film which is a landmark these days. The game they develop between the audience expectations and empathy with the protagonist Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), it changes back and forward all along the 105 min. These experiment has to do with my own interest in experimenting with the point of view in filmmaking, I think it's a very undeveloped aspect of the art. The experiment is masterfully used in The Silence of Lorna to get an understanding that people are not bad neither good, but is just the evil system that makes them do evil things for money in most of the cases.
The first shot is an insert of money in the hands of a bank worker who is helping Lorna with her account, the last one is of Lorna trying to get close to life, earth, motherhood.
Lorna lives with Claudy Moreau (Jérémie Renier) a heroin addict who marries her for money, she is an Albanian emigrant who now is a citizen of Belgium. Orchestrated by Fabio, Lorna will marry a Russian so he can get a passport after killing Claudy, of course for more money. Lorna thinks that after the complete operation she will be free to marry her boyfriend Sokol and with the money build a bar, but deep inside she knows that it's not gonna happen.
The whole movie is an instruction manual on how to criminally get a citizenship of a country member of the European Union and make easy illicit money, but really it is about how the economic and political structure word wide only helps people to become less human, beasts in the long run.

The system is the system but inside the corruption Lorna finds her humanity.

The Universe has no Center (The Limits of Control, 2009)

2009-11-15T08:22:00.000-08:00

Jim Jarmusch is here again to present us The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009).
Since Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995), which I think is his best film, he hasn't done anything so deep and moving (not in a narrative way though), spiritual and transcendental, again he uses film to talk about film itself which at its core is perfect not only to speak about metaphysics but to translate concepts, to display quantum physics and to experiment with the illusion of what we call reality. Jarmusch uses a genre wardrobe, Neo-Noir, and as the protagonist (Isaach De Bankole) is just cloth that he has on him for a special purpose like his silk elegant outfit that since the start of the film reminds us of Lee Marvin in Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967), but is not just the wardrobe then is the geometric composition, the psychedelic lighting and colors, the use of metal, textures, the confusion-expansion of time and space through editing of image and sound, we are watching a reformulation of Point Blank.

Soon we realize that we are not seeing a story developing, it's a meta film displaying abstract meditations, a device construct with delightful sequences about the absurdities of this reality that is nothing else but a dream and cinema has always been the best conduct to materialize dreams (as Glauber Rocha sees Luis Buñuel work). Jarmusch returns to his minimalist roots, declares that he is doing this game officially, (he produces the film with a new company called Point Blank) and sets sails with one of the best cinematographers alive: Chris Doyle (responsible for Wong Kar Wai's dreams) who also has the vocation of searching for the spirit in the webs that intersect in perceiving, creating the illusion capturing the experience through celluloid.

Lone Man (Isaach De Bankole) it could be the name of a Samuel Beckett's character, is contracted to solve a case, being adverted that the man who thinks he's better than the rest is dead already (dead man?), that there is not reality just perception, and that the universe has no center. It's all an illusion so what are we doing here?
As in his other film Ghost Dog (1999) we don't know much about the character, but we clearly see an antihero with a tight honor code, and a peculiar straight way of conduct, this time he practices tai chi, drinks two espressos at a time in two different cups religiously, he doesn't talk just observes, never sleeps nor has sex while working. As in Ghost Dog the film is connected with another Neo-Noir: Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), how Alain Delon character's loneliness leads him in a specific working forms, how he's connected to his higher self shown in the details and traces of conduct, how is it more about the antihero walkabouts in geometric metaphysical landscapes more than where he gets to, how Melville talks more with silence than with any kind of dialogue, sound, or noise.

So what is this metaphysical Neo-Noir game that Jarmusch is playing exactly about? supported by an over expressive psychedelic camera and a delirious musical soundtrack? Well I don't think is totally a conscious effort but he is forcing us to jump into another level of lecture, not a narrative one, he gets our intellect tired on purpose, he creates labyrinths of shades, forms, dimensions, to get our ego lost and to start lending our eyes to the spirit.
The Limits of Control is not just a relaboration of Point Blank in Spain is also making his previous film Broken Flowers (2005) again but in another dimension. A dimension where the antagonist is played by the protagonist of the last film Bill Murray, a representation of the system, the colonial slave master who thinks that we are all corrupted an polluted: our art, culture, brain. In Broken Flowers the antagonist remains anonymously unresolved (who wrote the letters?) and every time Don (Bill Murray) meets a new girl we think is she, but no, she's not. At the end the letters have the purpose to free him. While in The Limits of Control, the lone man, doesn't claims revenge, he is just finishing a job, and we can't stop experimenting Bill Murray as a Darth Vader if we see both films as episode 1 and 2.

Finding You, Finding Me (Transylvania, 2006)

2009-11-08T09:58:00.000-08:00

Tony Gatlif´s films are full of energy, tradition, sensuality and magic. He has opened windows to the ancient world (mostly the gypsy) which is very difficult because it´s an unstable place, alive but hungry, it can devour you in a second. He bridges both worlds: the ancient, materially poor, full of festivity and mystery and the technological, logical, spiritually poor, through a character. A character that as in a Carlos Castaneda's book enters this veiled world to get some information, some fun or recover something from his past, following an unconscious desire; his soul expressing in a way that his ego can't understand. On the road he gets initiated, he sees the futility of his reality, opens up to transformation and gets born into an spiritual kingdom that has no end.
In Transylvania (2006) Zingarina (Asia Argento) goes looking for the guy responsible for his pregnancy and his lunacy in Transylvania, a crazy gypsy musician. When she finds him, he doesn't want to be with her, he even gets angry for her presence and runs to play in the local festivities, she goes crazy and looses herself in those festivities that leads her to a fight with her own ego in the Romanian countryside. She follows a little girl who has a freedom that she doesn't understand, she lives in the street, she doesn't need anything else but what people gives her. The girl takes Zingarina to meet his soul mate, Tchangalo (Birol Une) who takes care of her in a rough way during a torrid pregnancy, living together on the road while he runs from town to town buying stuff to sell later. Sleeping under the stars, hanging a chandelier from an ancient structure connected to street electricity, fighting with pillows in the middle of the covered by snow street, the white forest around them and the wet pavement covered by feathers.
We get to see wonderful physical landscapes, musical ones, international crashes of mentalities and as other Gatlif movies incredible musical soundtracks (Gatlif is a musician responsible for all the soundtracks of all his movies) played alive in a sort of fiction filmmaking that is nothing else but a mystical documentary amazingly shot by the talented director of photography Celine Bozon.
As a dessert we get to experience the beauty of Amira Casar that has never appear so human.

Karmic Bonds (500 days of summer)

2009-10-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

(500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb) could have been a great movie if it wasn't made in Hollywood, think canal plus or even channel four, because this movie depends greatly on the looks that come with money, but outside an industry that makes you sacrifice a philosophically contemporary much in need ending for a feel good one: "boy gets to find the beautiful chick missing link for a soul mate as a product placement before the rolling credits".
But I have to say that the movie is very interesting, cunning but never loosing the emotional part in the structure, because of his protagonist Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a human that breaths, sweats and feels, breaking the spell of the silver screen to take us into a reflection of our existence in this 3d dimension.
Hansen works as a creator of Hallmark cards and one day he meets Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), an attractive new worker, mostly because of her blue eyes that make a powerful combination with her black hair, he immediately thinks that she is her soul mate because of many cliches like being fan of the Smiths like him, wearing old dresses, and being independent in an artistic way. The interesting part of the film comes not with the unconscious Brechtian flash backs and imaginary scenes, that for me are not really necessary but some very enjoyable anyway like the Han Solo window reflection or the blue bird animation jumping from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) to Hansen's shoulder in a musical scene; but within the relationship that starts between them. Summer is introduced to us as a wonderful girl to win the heart of, but slowly we understand that she is not nice at all, she's the antagonist of this duel in which our hero has to survive in order to begin existing for real, she gives him life as a Frankenstein doctor to the creature. Even if, again, the transformation has to rely on cliches like returning to his real path as an architect, path that the society has put on him one way or an other, not really his soul has expressed.
I have to mention a fantastic moment that is totally brilliant even if it appears at first arbitrary, it goes further ahead of what Conversations with other Women (Hans Canosa, 2005) did; Warhol to the infinite: Chelsea Girls (Morrissey, Warhol, 1966). A split screen in which we see two scenes happening at the same time, in one screen we see the scene as it's happening in reality and in the other we see the same scene as it was in the mind of Hansen, the expectations being throw violently against reality, the planet of imagination versus the kingdom of the real, cinema used to explore our reality and perception like no other medium can.

Blinded by Sight (The Weeping Willow)

2009-10-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

The Weeping Willow (Majid Majidi, 2005) is giving you some light so you can get blind on your own, understanding that what we have is good for us, more is trouble and never enough.

Youssef (Parviz Parastui) is blind, although he is a happy teacher; he has always been, happy and also blind. He lives in Tehran but one day he travels to France to get checked about some cancer he has under one of his eyes. Doctors are surprised that with surgical intervention his eyes would work, they operate and he can see the world with his own eyes now. The silly, full of information professor, that he has always misunderstood for knowledge, is going to get tested by the world (a final course exam).
In a fantastic scene, much in debt with Robert Bresson, he sees all his family behind a crystal panel, they are happy to see him, he feels his mother and finally can experience how does she looks like, he knows now how does his wife physically is, but he instantly becomes infatuated with the good looking wife of his uncle. He confuses lust with love, vanity and superficiality with his true path, giving his back to the Eden where he joyfully lived once, transforming it into a dark hell.

Majidi tells us that the idea for the film comes from a talk with a blind man who told him about his blind perceptions of the world around him. Majidi thought about constructing a world for his character which is familiar to him through his blindness, then showing to him how this world looks like, where he really has to end up finding himself between form and substance.

The character's arc that Parastui builds reminds me of classical transcendental filmmaking, think what Bresson, Dreyer, Tarkovski, and Ozu's characters have in common and then search for it on Youssef. He does very bad on this test, but at the end of the day his spirit gets free.

A Walk Without Clouds (Blood Appears, La Sangre Brota, 2008)

2009-09-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

Blood Appears (Pablo Fendrik, 2008) is a walk on the pain of a broke up family, a society that doesn't give a shit, staying together even if we hate each other? Why. Ambiguity surrounds the film and keeps us going, mystery and pain is around the corner.

Leandro (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is an unconscious, wants to remain like that, adolescent who works producing metanphetamines (also consumes them as or with candy) on a cyber cafe that is just a cover. Leandro finds Vanesa (Ailín Salas) on the streets and immediately his heart jumps, we can see in his eyes that she is a ticket to his long lost innocence, his girlfriend (Guadalupe Docampo) is jealous. In the meantime Leandro's father Arturo (Arturo Goetz) starts a peculiar relationship with a passenger who opens for him a world that brakes all his conceptions.
Father and son are not meant to be together.
With a rapid overexposed and underexposed camera, Fendrik catches some reactions that are delicious to watch, the characters of this film are interlink with each other like it or not, they are part of a world that doesn't work, a dog that barks before seeing you.
The sound is well used to convey, comment, take us away from and expand moments that are closer to us through the ear that marries the eye in a bloody wedding.

The Road is Paved (Drag me to Hell)

2009-08-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

Drag me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009) is a fable about the recent inmobiliary crisis in the United States, a caricature of how can you end up in hell even having a good heart if you don't listen to it.
Christie Brown (Alison Lohman, without her the movie doesn't work) has to have a better position at work so she decides to deny a third home loan to a client, Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver) a gypsy woman who after attacking her in her car decides to put a curse on her, a demon is going to drive her crazy for three days and then is going to take her to hell.
Spooky scenes very in debt with Nosferatu (F.W Murnau, 1922), The Day of the Beast (Alex de la Iglesia, 1995), The Entity (Sidney J. Furie), and of course Evil Dead made by the same director of this film, are juxtaposed with funny almost delirious awkward moments. The connecting link is Alison Lohman who is awesome in both realities, she has so many different expressions in her face that automatically turns what could have been an entertaining movie into a very interesting serious film that has many lectures and not for this reason less fun.

The bridge to nowhere but the heart (In the Pit/En el Hoyo)

2009-08-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

In the Pit - aka En el Hoyo (Juan carlos Rulfo, 2006) is a poem dress in an official documentary suit about the construction of the second floor in the freeway inside Mexico City. The film is very heart oriented, full of nice feelings and rememberances of this working people thinking about their life in the country side, or the house they just built with a lot of effort. In Mexico we have a tradition in the lowest class that is to build a small house and start living in it, when you earn more money you can construct another room, and then another floor, at certain moment in the film one of the workers shows his new house like that and the whole enterprise of building a second floor is like that. The director is brave enough to shoot in very dangerous conditions, romantic filmmaking at his purest form, also brave enough to find his own voice; he is the son of Mexico´s best writer Juan Rulfo and until now his movies where possessed by his father´s presence.
Along the film we are going to know very strong characters, full of dreams, their life vision, their quest, their doubts, it is an aesthetic experience that happens without one knowing is happening, a human piece that reminds us the pleasure to be alive, even if we don´t live in the best conditions or the best conditions that we think would bring us happiness. The music by Leonardo Heiblum gives the film its final texture moods, as in the electronic etno group deep forest music that uses aboriginal children voices samples, Leonardo helps Juan Carlos making the movie fly.

Dinosaur Pen (MAMMOTH)

2009-08-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

Mammoth (Lukas Moodysson, 2009) is how this globalized system structure controls the minimum detail in our daily life, forcing us to stop planning and thinking what we really are suppose to be doing, taking away our time that at the end of the day was the only thing that we had. Why can't we be with our dear ones having a blast of a time? Why can't we enjoy our everyday? Instead we make money, fame and collect commodities.

Leo Vidales (Gael García Bernal) is a millionaire video game designer who has to travel to Thailand to close a deal, on the private jet his partner gives him a pen made of mammoth worth 3000$, so he can sign the final deal. Ellen Vidales (Michelle Williams) stays in their elegant floor in Manhattan with Jackie their daughter who is always hanging out with, the awesomely close to the heart maid, Gloria (Marife Necesito) who also left her son in the Phillipines with her mother.
Leo gets bored very fast and runs to the beach, when he arrives to a very expensive hotel, he runs once more to a cheap bungalow and slowly starts to enjoy the life of freedom that is forbidden to him now. Jackie loves Gloria much more than her mother because Ellen is always in the hospital where she works, and the son of Gloria is having a hell of an existence back in the Phillipines because his grandmother is an abusive full of anger woman and Gloria is no place to be seen.
So nobody is happy, except Jackie, but momentarily because Gloria is not her mother. But it's a question of jerarquies, concepts, and misconceived responsabilities; their beings going crazy because of their minds following orders that don't help at all, everybody cries.
Why would you want a 3000 pen? If you are not even going to be able to sign your daughter's notes, or write a nice card to your wife, what about drawing something nice? Why would you want to be the best surgeon in town? If you can't share your accomplishments and your failures with people that you love. Why would you want to be rich? Even if you did it just doing what you like, if you can't do what you like anymore. Why would you want to earn more money in a distant country? If your loved ones are starving.

Moodysson, staying always away from melodrama, builds strong characters and traps them in their own walls, he makes very real situations not supported by continuity action matching, he goes for reactions all the times, he goes for the life of the shot, and he continues shooting then he puts everything together in a film order but there is not a continuity lost in the audience perception.

Since Lilja 4-ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2002) he exposed how developing countries rely on prostitution as an industry also showing how first world countries are the main consumers and organizers, these developed countries on the other hand keep inside a perfectly "clean" image to enjoy and be proud of, like having and enjoying a secret nightmare inside a wonderful dream, but and induced dream that is not real. In Mammoth, Moodysson gets his point across in a subtle way that fuses with the drama in a very naturalistic way.

Have you seen her wearing that colorful sweater? (Happy-Go-Lucky)

2009-08-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

In Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008) Poppy (Sally Hawkins) lives with Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), yes both have J.D Salinger's names, and also both live in a parallel universe that Poppy has created. A place where not smiling is wrong, if kids are not enjoying the their day (because is theirs) is also wrong, being genuinely nice is the only way to enter this kingdom.

Poppy is taking driving lessons with Scott (an awesome barking all the time non stop rottweillbull Eddie Marsan) who doesn't know how to deal with his anger and all the conspiracy theories that live in his head. He has a lot to do with different characters that live in Leigh's work, like Johnny from Naked for example, these characters are frustrated with the world we live in and try to live in a kind of personal cave to escape; they talk about real stuff like New World Order, cruel consumerism, ferocious individualism, manipulating educational systems, etc..., but the problem is their anger, they end up being worst than the control system that they attack. Scott is the antithesis of Poppy, who lives each day not as if it was the last one but as it is the only one; she tries to help him but can't do anything with an already lost case.
The driving lessons are going to divide the episodes where Poppy gets tested by the "common" universe we all live in. She will triumph with a huge smile, even in front of a hysteric Flamenco dance teacher, who again can't deal with her anger using the classes to deal with it.
Mike Leigh is one of the best actor's director alive and what he does with Sally Hawkins is no exception, we can see past without the use of flashbacks, it's obvious that her room mate Zoe suffered in the past, it's obvious that she changed to a magnificent happy humble life because of Poppy, it's obvious that she will kill anyone who tries to make Poppy suffer, and not one of this things appear in an obvious action, scene or dialogue in the film.

Poppy is the first true Buddhist character that I have seen in a film theater in a while, to see her is a blessing, a laughing Buddha colorfully dress.

paradise on the roof (I´m Going to Explode, Voy a Explotar, 2009)

2009-06-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

I’m Going to Explode (Gerardo Naranjo, 2009) is fresh acting from young actors from the planet of Under the Same Moon (Patricia Riggen, 2007), even containing lyrical moments coming from where Telenovelas are produced and even playing with some elements from them.

As in Zéro de Conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933), Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago) and Maru (Maria Deschamps), rebel against their teachers, parents and status quo but this time in Guanajuato, Mexico. He steals her on her own will wearing a very funny mask that surfs dangerously with cliché, sometimes I think that Naranjo gets his kicks from surfing the catastrophe, he enjoys when people are almost like: “Let’s leave the theatre honey“ but in that moment something happens that makes them stay.
Eugenio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is his father, and the only one that is not worried about him, he knows that he is playing, with a gun but playing. Under pressure Eugenio decides to start looking for his son with his wife´s help (Rebecca Jones) everywhere but in his own roof, where the young couple is camping; under the stars and next to a Smith´s poster. When they are almost discovered, Roman and Maru travel to a country side party where humble people (the ones that Eugenio has built his fortune from) are celebrating. Roman is very drunk and paranoid with every guy in the party thinking that they want to get involved with Maru; the party recalls Gael García Bernal’s fun times before driving pass the border illegally in Babel (González Iñrritu, 2006) in one of his best roles. From the next morning on, the film is brave, and reaches lyrical moments that are at any level of International vanguards, until the screenplay becomes a problem, instead of helping, it gets in the way of the movie for any spectator (I talked with some before telling them I felt the same). Anyway, something that is very new of Naranjo, as a Mexican filmmaker, is his view of female roles. In his movies they always start slowly but they get to rule the show, they support their male partners until they have to save the day, having more strength than their partners to decide the future of the story.
Once Fassbinder talked about why did he liked female actresses better for the screen, and he replied that they express feelings that men don’t even know exist.

Take Me Away, please (Knowing, 2009)

2009-06-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

Knowing (Alex Proyas, 2009) it’s a blessing disguised as a curse, a menace that holds a hope, a film made by higher interstellar intelligences dressed as Hollywood executives.

John Koestler (Nicholas Cage) is a scientist and as a good scientist he believes only that “shit happens”, that the events that make life are not related and we are ruled by chance. Everything changes when his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) gets a written paper page coming from the past containing a lot of numbers, when John decodifies the numbers he realizes that they represent dates when mayor cataclysms have occurred; also some that are about to happen. One of them being mayor: related with the sun destroying the human civilization.

Being a Hollywood movie it comes with a lot of clichés, but it’s also a very nice visualization of theories that are real, and it’s well done by a director that is good at turning average screenplays into gorgeous allegories full of cinematic quotes (The Crow, Dark City, I Robot) Knowing is not an exception.

Give Me Shelter Last Days (Involuntary)

2009-06-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Involuntary (Ruben Östlund, 2008) is a very raw portrait of contemporary Sweden, made with different extremely long takes that are badly framed on purpose and which give you a sense of being in the same space where the scene is taking place, a very voyeuristic approach to filmmaking.
The film is composed of different story lines in which the protagonist of each one is left alone.
In one of them two very young girls are taking pictures of themselves with the help of their computer’s I photo, in a fantastic meta scene of contemporary resonances, they start drinking hard and decide to continue drinking outside with friends. On the train ride they meet a guy who they play with showing a lot of an empty culture, getting more empty because of its education system.

In another one a man puts some fireworks in a Christmas celebration for children amusement, when the firework doesn’t work he goes trying to check and receives the exploding firework in his eye (I thought it only happened in Mexico to the same uncle). He just doesn’t want to go to the doctor, but finally health attacks where you don’t think is going to attack, expectations are bad not just with good things.
The third one is about a very successful actress who is taking a bus in the countryside, she has an accident in the bathroom that becomes a huge problem when she doesn’t confess to have done it, the driver has been left by her wife and we discover maybe the reason; he stops the bus until someone confesses the bathroom episode, the night falls.
My favorite was the one in which we met a woman professor who teaches very young kids, she is very compromised and we see the contrast with her colleagues who are just there for the coffee and cake. One day, she sees how one of the professors becomes violent with a kid and she is the only one who tries to do something about it.

In the last one, we are witness of the worst way of drinking falling into sexually perverted games that are forgotten in the morning after.
This film reminds me of Roy Andersson’s episodic films, but while he uses metaphoric and farce elements Involuntary is constructed in a very realistic way, but the result is very similar, a very violent attack towards Swedish conformist culture.

(Last photograph is courtesy of J.C Melgar from the screening at El Foro de la Cienteca, 2009)

The professor is a student also (The Class, Entre les murs)

2009-06-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

I’m a professor and for moments I really loose control with guys over 22 years old, I can’t imagine what would happened with 13 year old people. But for François Marin (François Bégaudeau) is a pleasure to guide and wake up a big group of high school students teaching them French, in a public school full of children of illegal residents, poor kids, a lot of them coming from the Caribbean or African colonies, in the winner of the Palm d'Or,
The Class (Entre les murs, Laurent Cantet, 2008).
A hyper-real essay on what to do with so many years of slaving, exploiting, and humiliating people who for decades where not considered people; after running without any shame an imperialistic system which suddenly jumps into a democracy and tries to forget.
The directing of this film is incredible, a long time has passed from the times in which I saw movies in which I forgot I was watching a film, and it happened again with this wonderful moving picture full of lessons.

François is full of good intentions but he is not perfect, and at the end he will learn more from his students than they from him, they will teach him a lot of lessons. For example at the beginning other professor asks him to try to give them material to read related with the history class, he recommends Voltaire, and François thinks is too difficult; at the end of the movie when he is asking the students what have they learned? A girl tells him that nothing of his interest but that she found a book called The Republic by Plato, François doubts and asks what was it about? The girl answers what the book is really about, not what François thought was about all his life.

Being born into a trap (Wendy and Lucy)

2009-05-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

Wendy and Lucy (2008), second feature of Kelly Reichardt after her impressive debut with Old Joy (2006) a sort of Knife in the Water (1962) Zen game where you think that you are watching Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) part 2 and at the end you are stroke with the notion that your spirit was part of a Confusionist contemplative series of images with hypnotizing sound while your brain was very busy figuring out why nothing dramatic was happening during 76 minutes.

Wendy and Lucy is a desperate cry against passive aggressive cannibal capitalism, a painful film to watch that makes you feel that you are alive, but also makes you feel mercy.
Wendy (Michelle Williams) is traveling by car to Alaska looking for a job and a better way of life; she is short of money but full of love for her dog Lucy. Her car brakes down, and she doesn’t have any money to buy food for Lucy, she’s ok without eating but Lucy no way, so she decides to shoplift some dog food cans. Wendy leaves Lucy tied outside the store but gets caught in her shoplifting attempt and turn in to the police. When she gets out the dog is no longer there, the film becomes this Alice in Wonderland in Portland, Oregon, searching for rabbit clues all over. But what really starts is a reflection about money distribution, political systems responsibility, consumerism, surviving with a strong spirit and what about the poor innocents?

As they say in the film:

WENDY
Not a lot of Jobs round here, ha?

GOOD GUARD
I’d say, I don’t know what people do all day,
there used to be a mill but it closed long time ago,
I don’t now what they do.

WENDY
You can’t get a job without an address anyway

GOOD GUARD
You can’t get an address without an address, you
can’t get a job without a job, it’s all fixed.

This conversation happens between Wendy and the only person who tries to help her along the film, a security guard of a store who works 12 hours and is looking all day long to the streets.

Kelly Reichardt teaches film in College and you can totally see that in her films, she talks about her life surrounding poetic being conscious of film art and using more than 100 years tradition of filmmaking, she really know hat she is doing in so many levels.

Michelle Williams presence is so strong in the screen but it takes you a while to realize that you are watching a rising star who works very different than her contemporaries, she works from her insides, her emotions can be seen in her eyes reminding us Bergman actresses without having to gesticulate in a crazy theatrical form, and her movements and the way Reichardt is using her is totally Bressonian. You totally believe that she is a teenager running away in trouble, her characterization is out of Hollywood, well Charlize Theron did very good in Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) but the make-up help her lot, Williams-Reichardt collaboration is pure Shamanism.

Besides shooting her movies where she is from, the North West Area in the US, the way she uses Oregon is nature surrounding cities, surrounding contemporary empty man, claiming us back because guess what? We are not plastic.

Use your illusions

2009-05-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

Cherry Blossoms (Doris Dörrie, 2008) is a magical candy that teaches you to die happily after learning that you don't know anything about being alive, you can see now that you have always live only for yourself but if you want to be happy then you are doing everything wrong, you have to do it for others.

Trudi Angermeier (Hannelore Elsner) is a middle age beautiful woman from the inside out, who learns soon that she’s about to die. She decides not to talk to her husband, Rudi Angermeier (Elmar Wepper, the best acting this year besides Mickey Rourke) about it, a husband that depends totally on her. He is the kind of guy who needs “someone” to complaint about everything; guess who’s gonna be that “someone”? Trudi likes the flies, she can see even the worst creature of creation as the most beautiful and unique, she’s alive. Rudi likes the apples, recommending them to keep the doctor away.
The couple travels to another city to see their son and daughter, who are not dying to hang out with them, then travel to the sea where Trudi dies. Rudi is destroyed and suddenly understands that Trudi has given all her life for them and she didn’t live her own life; she had always loved the mount Fuji and Japanese culture, but Rudi didn’t care. Their youngest son lives in Japan and Rudi travels to visit him and becomes human along the way, always caring Trudi around with him, sometimes even wearing her clothes so she can see Japan, with the final stop at mount Fuji.

Color correction in video that makes it almost Fauvist spectacle, the colors work to differentiate each episode as if it they are the different chapters of a book. When Trudi dies the movie is a constant voyage, Rudi flies to visit his youngest son to Tokyo, where he confesses that he escaped his mother emotional dependence but he kept being loyal to her mother emotional needs, he even leaves for her dream place, the place that she never get to know and now she is dead, he cries.

But the camera is always getting closer to Rudi, we get closer to Rudi, because Rudi is starting to exist after decades of having a body.
Cherry Blossoms is candy, sugar, bubble gum chewy bubble gum with which you can do enormous bubbles.

MCZ Museo Carlo Zauli: MCZ e i social networking

2009-04-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

MCZ Museo Carlo Zauli: MCZ e i social networking

http://psicanzuelo.blogspot.com/

Lakshmi in Connecticut is not going back to drinking

2009-04-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008) is an arch of emotions that when catch by the lens they get different colors, an almost direct cinema structure behind a very strong character piece built around a wonderful melodramatic script that hits you in your gut.
Kym (Anne Hathaway) is an addict, but she is granted a weekend off her detox clinic so she can assist her sister Rachel´s (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding. The whole movie is sort of a mad hatter after-dinner conversation with American girls dress in saris (Indian dresses) mockumentary. The continuous boxing match between Rachel and Kym is affecting the family, but also serves as a dark presence around a wedding that is a cry for freedom, too glorious to be truth, but guess what? It’s truth.
The movie works as if someone had been putting a lot of mirrors in different parts of the Connecticut house where this gorgeous wedding is taking place, like a big brother show from the nice feeling inside a not totally functional family; Kym, for a long time, has been helping this family to open their mind but maybe is time for her to learn not to be a central piece, to dissolve her ego: Anne Hathaway giving us a truly, Anne, a truly Hathaway, but besides her always Kym.
There is scene where Kym drives away from the house, she is almost going back to the habit, she speeds the car through the dark road in the middle of the forest, the car goes off the road, airbag jumps out and it’s about going back to this miraculous party about leaving all the trash out.

In the realm of his senses

2009-03-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

Taxidermia (György Pálfi, 2006) is a metaphor in three acts, three time periods of the socialist dream, a grotesque and cruel comical hyper real caricature of selling out, of loosing the cold war against consumerism of humans by humans.

Balatony Kálmán (Gergely Trócsányi) is a general who’s wife is immaculately pregnant by a soldier under his command Morosgoványi Vendel (Csaba Czene) through some sex act with pork pieces in a tube (as crazy as it sounds). Balatony Kálmán kills the insolent but can’t stop the fact of having a baby with a pig tail, of course he cuts it. The baby grows older (without the tail) to become a champion of eating like a pig, Öreg Balatony Kálmán (Gábor Máté) on an Olympical level and later has another son Balatony Lajoska (Marc Bischoff) who will become the taxidermist of his own father.

The anecdote has strong political meanings that in Hungary should be obviously more clear, but for any audience is a succession of strong images almost in a dream level that become the nightmare of the excesses that we have fallen as a global entity. A farce that forshadows the craziness still to come.

With a powerful soundtrack by Brazilian electronic music composer Amon Tobin, fantastic color cinematography (Gergely Pohárnok) that changes from act to act but remains elegant in a whole style, a production design that is close to a comic book remaining always realistic, and even better special makeup effects (Iván Pohárnok) that puts it into a hyper real level where our sensibility can get shocked to understand the danger pit we are in.

A surreal realistic adaptation of Hungarian Lajos Parti Nagy stories that can work as lullaby for any dictator.

Poetic haunting in the age of the machine

2009-03-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Frontier of the Dawn (Philippe Garrel, 2008) is a retro metaphysical thriller of hypnotic proportions, a tragically romantic ghost-love story in unsaturated black and white, the grey is all around us.

François (Louis Garrel, son of the magical director, we could talk for a while about who is more talented) loves Carole (Laura Smet) but more like and art object, he is a photographer and no one looks better in front of his lens than the feline blond. When this love becomes real or as real as it can get, he can’t bare it, he runs amok not knowing of her psychological unstableness that forces her to take her own life away. François finds real love in Ève (Clémentine Poidatz) but Carole’s ghost soon appears to hunt him from inside a mirror calling him.

This argument seems to come from a teenage horror flick written by TV people, but it is something else. Why do the exotic images of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008) look like an Old Spice TV commercial and this black and white ambiances are far from a Ralph Lauren or George Marciano superficial parameters? First of all Frontier of the Dawn is a meticulous and perfectly balanced exercise of human behavior observation. On the other hand it is an Auteur's approach on shooting his own genes through the screen, his son being his shadow in more than one way. The film technique is very clean, but the pace of the dialogue with its many subtexts is a labyrinth for the senses, the mood is established between the arrangement of hunting locations and what is said on them.
Watching the film I remembered the classical: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947). Why could't François have met a more friendly ghost? Is she a ghost? Or was him the ghost?

Hail to the Master!

2009-03-12T19:02:00.001-07:00

Changeling (Clint Eastwood 2008) is a reversal on the Peter-Pan archetype, a masterpiece on directing actors perfectly in synch with strongly expressive camera blockings, it is the final test to consider Angelina Jolie a great actress who has been missing a director to help her shine (A Mighty Heart, Michael Winterbottom, 2007).

Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) is a wonderful single mom whose peace is broken when her son Walter Collins (Gattlin Griffith) disappears in a mysterious way. More mysterious is the fact that the LAPD incarnated in, the face of dog, Capt J.J Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) tells her that her son was found, but when she sees him she realizes that this little kid is not her son, J.J Jones forces her to accept him because “she is now having normal problems of recognition that happen to all kidnap victims”. Christine tries to live with this little guy trying to pretend that he’s her kid, knowing he is not but saturated with enough grief to be paralyzed. She’ll have to battle the whole justice system just to tell the truth.
In the mean time there is a demented guy killing kids with an axe in a lonely farm as if they where turkeys and Thanksgiving day was approaching.

In a perfecrtly situated period piece (L.A, 1928) with gorgeous sets, wardrobe, and props where the detail makes you be esyly teletrasported, Mr. Eastwood flies like an experimented seagull hunting for fish, he moves with grace his camera on amazing choreographed movements that never bluff but serve the drama.
As it happens with Robinson Devor work (Policebeat 2005, Zoo 2007) or with classics like Pier Paolo Passolini’s Salo (1975), the film developes a synergy between the grotesque of its theme and the beauty of its images in a philosophical statement.
Changeling is classic filmmaking, in every sence in every frame, in every breathing of it’s extremely well directed actors.
The film is about hope and about letting go, but more about being genuine and looking for the truth, but sometimes the truth is stronger that what we think is the truth. Hope, a theater is announcing It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) a very sweet movie, that maybe announces better times at the feet of the starting storm.

Mickey Rourke

2009-02-03T12:03:00.001-08:00

The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008) is not Mickey Rourke’s come back but the Masterpiece of an actor that defines an era. Randy “The Ram” Robinson is the older brother from Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983) trying to save the day in a No Man’s Land, he’s John from 9 ½ Weeks (Adrian Lyne, 1986) not needing a “super soft” light or a Trapper Keeper’s back light, James Wheeler from Wild Orchid (Zalman King, 1989) if someone had stolen his motorcycle leaving him without even his social security number, or Harry Chinansky from Barfly (Barbet Schroeder, 1984) without alcoholism to set off his decrepitude and without Wanda Wilcox to share at least his dementia. “The Ram” is Harry Angel from Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987) without needing the devil’s help to be totally doomed, Marv from Sin City (Rodriguez vs. Miller, 2005) without having a fair chance to fight back.
“The Ram” is trying to survive being an ex-pro-wrestler, sometimes he has to even work in a supermarket cutting meat or cheese to keep it up. But the difficult part for this big guy, will not be to taint again blond some of his hair roots, or start the engine of his old van in the middle of the cold environment, but to make her daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) enter again in his life, and finally learn, that happiness was always there but away from the four strings.
Aronofsky changes the safety of Matthew Libatique’s virtuosismo for talented usage of the cinematographic machine by adaptable to everything “looks great”, Maryse Alberti (Tape, Velvet Goldmine, Crumb). The film finds truth while following, almost in a cinema veritte raw style, the apocalyptic tough steps of someone who just wants to do what is right, someone who has not had the chance to define himself against what everyone has ever think about him, someone who has a soul but has never been in touch with her. Clint Mansell is as always there, present, playing in the outfield catching all the dangerous plays, but elegant and subtle as ever, mixing his sensibility with some of “The Ram’s” hard rock music tastes like Cinderella, Ratt, or Scorpions; there are even some special thanks to Axel Rose in the end credits.

What if the Titanic never sank?

2009-01-13T03:25:00.000-08:00

Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008) is what would have happened to Rose and Jack if the Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) never sank, if it had reach its destiny, being hopeless before the emptiness of the middle class suburbia in the American way of life.
Sam Mendes has always confront the American way of life, finding true characters in its forced structures made of lies, lies that the individual has to believe to be truth in order to survive, but you can't sleep forever or pretend.
April (Kate Winslet) and Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) fall in love, she wants to be an actress and he wants to be something that he doesn’t have time to know yet. After years of marriage and two kids (the presence of the kids is very well managed kind of the Teacher in the Peanut cartoons, because the drama is between the two “adults”) in the middle of a couple crisis, April decides to travel to Paris and give Frank the chance to finally discover what he wants to do in life while she works, Frank accepts.
Roger Deakins cinematography is great because of it’s simplicity, you don’t realize that it’s there but you feel it, it goes along with Mendes mise en scene, simplicity that leaves Winslet - Dicaprio in an emotional wrestling match that could hurt any open viewer. The camera appears just to support the most dramatic well-achieved moments like April’s final decision: supported by the tree when the sun light is almost gone, the light of her cigarette shines like a dying star, the camera pans her leading us to tragedy.

Young blood from the old tree

2008-12-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008) is good times, some giggles in the dark, is as young as Woody Allen has ever been in all his life.
Once I was talking with Gerardo Naranjo coming out from his first feature film (Malachance, 2004) screened at the first FICCO, he recommend me Elephant very much and did a great deal about The Dreamers (later deny it as his biggest influence for Dramamex in my point of view) and he told me “It´s incredible that old guys as Bertolucci and Gus Van Sant are showing young guys like us how should young blood should shoot” I agreed.
Vicky (revelation Rebecca Hall) is young, sensitive and complacent she is about to marry, a wallet with a garage, but decides to travel to relax first to Barcelona, she is in love with Gaudí. Her friend the rush in the head coming from below the navel hitting the heart on its way up out of control Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is coming with her. While Vicky is enjoying the Spanish classical guitar, almost dropping a tear, Cristina accepts an invitation from the Devil in disguise Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) to fly that same night to Oviedo and perhaps make love the three of them.
Matchpoint (2005) is Allen’s more mature work, his best one in my point of view. Since then he has only disappoint with the over dramatic in the wrong way, leaving all the screenplay gaps in the way Cassandra's Dream (2007) and the over silly Scoop (2006). But now I realize that he was just warming up his arm for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. He has lost all his fears, Woody is free! Gentle men! He even does disastrous trying to direct Penelope Cruz in Spanish, but you know what? It doesn’t matter at all. When you watch this film you can feel his love for cinema, but not with direct references that always seemed so stiff and false, as he used to do even with the best cinematographers and the best production designers help. Now is subtleness and it feels nice, you can feel the French New Wave, you can feel Antonioni, you can feel Bergman, you can feel Lubitch. But more than anything else you can feel his love for life, this film is a Festival that celebrates being alive!
Rebecca Hall (The Prestige), well she deserves some words, she gives the film its deepness that contrast with its beautiful surface, she helps Bardem go inside himself, she made me smile more that once, feeling in a different way each time.
And now I need to go, because I desperately need some vacations…

Light

2008-12-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

The Duchess (Saul Dibb, 2008) is an amazing catalogue of light in the most gorgeous locations if you like Europe in the 18th century. A masterpiece of cinematography coming from the unsung artists of celestial contrasts, the Hungarian Gyula Pados (Evening, Basic Instincts 2). Diffuse High Key lighting during cold breakfasts, where even the dogs are arranged in a perfect composition, helped by the all white production design by Michael Carlin (In Bruges, The War Zone) where what really means is the finesse of the detail and that can only come up for the viewer in textures, this scene remind me of 2001 (Kubrick, 1968). The light in this film remind me of many great cinematographers, but it really remind me of Nykvist and Bergman, Bergman says in his memories that they used to discuss quality of light for days during summer in Sweden´s country side.
Warm Hard light for hush moments in bed, warm soft for gentle table times, perfect simulation of candlelight. Cold days, the air becomes thick under this gentle man filter. Pados lights with a grace that seems comes with no effort, he lights with the same success a wide shot than the closest close up. Textures in the air during exterior scenes where the background is green, the contrast is perfect between sunny parts, even if it is a white dress, and shades.
Watching The Duchess is a similar pleasure as walking in a museum watching the great masters of painting.

Hard Sell

2008-12-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

After watching In the City of Sylvia the other night I went inside another room in the cinema for free, where the last James Bond film was about to start.In the first car chase scene I thought “Hey, I hate James Bond's films, I just like the credits, and I always forget.”
Quantum of Solace (2008) is directed by a good director, Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction) but it really doesn’t make any difference. When it was the turn of Lee Tamahori to direct his 007 movie (Die Another Day, 2002), if well had some interesting Madonna fencing act, he talked about the old machinery that exists in a 007 film, where the director only coordinates everything and directs certain intimate actors scenes (and you don’t have much of them) where you have a unit that takes care of car chasing scenes, another one who shoots boat pursuits, then another one does plane chases, etc… And all of them are shooting at the same time in different places of the world. So who is really directing the James Bond Film?
So Quantum of Solace is not a difference, a very empty movie without a soul, with great credits sequence, awesome hotel rooms and even better gorgeous headquarters of the people who are trying to do an evil, evil, evil action. As always a good performance from the main bad guy this time by Mathew Amalric.
What is interesting is to see that the system that has been corrupting the world for a while is finding it hard to find someone to blame it for: no terrorists, no communists, no huge drug lord, and this time the discourse is becoming more sober and cynical. Constructing and destroying 3rd world countries: Banana republics where you can decide what the president going to be angry about, who is he going to chase now, starting a blood war without any sense while finishing all the state's money, leaving behind so many amazing projects without resolution. Order him to visit Argentine and have a boner at the dinner table with its president in turn the hottie Cristina Kirchner and act like a complete stupid with it.
“Sell your national resources, sell your oil, sell now, become rich, filthy rich look at El Chupacabras, we have never lied”.
The discourse of the people who James has to fight now is as simple as a Happy Meal: "Control the appearances and regulate a country like a transnational corporation and then crash it in the market." But it feels nice to hear it like this, totally cynical, corrupting the silver screen. Crossing from the unconsciousness to the consciousness, for Freud this would have meant recovery from a patient.

You come from my past, but from a past that I don´t know...

2008-11-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since the last time that I watched a film, a real one I mean. Two nights ago the screening of Lisandro Alonso´s Liverpool (2008) was a complete disappointment, a real downer, coming from the director that was becoming the messiah of a new Latin American cinema. Like the characters from Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) discuss about great artists of our time that had it and lost it; maybe I’m sounding like Hollywood now, a place where you are what your last movie is. Liverpool is a failure in many ways, but the main one could be the director loosing his sharp Zen path and falling into horrible complacencies.

But last night I was saved again, I had the opportunity to watch In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007), a gentle little masterpiece in a summer labyrinth of time, a fresh breeze in this infernal fast food parlor, a hope.

Guerín’s film reminds me of Antonioni in more than one-way.

A young guy (Xavier Lafitte) is on vacation in a city where he had been some time before and while drawing different girls in a coffee place he spots a particular one (Pilar López de Ayala) that instantly grabs his attention making him stand up and run amok after her. A sensually long almost philosophical pursuit starts in some very picturesque street corridors, where sometimes love graffiti exclamation fill the screen; until he gets to her inside a train car and calls her by the name of Sylvia, she tells him that she is not called like that and gets offended after learning that he has been following her for the last hour.
The scene that I just described in a very futile way, is poetry in motion in the most exquisite cinema tradition, the angle of the shots used, the lighting, the timing; the montage with it’s particular rhythm extremely musical in itself. The coffee scene that is Proustian in a sweet way, is constructed with unsymmetrical compositions that rely on our everyday perception and not in Hollywood values.

Distant Thunder

2008-11-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

Nuri Bilge Ceylan directed Distant (Uzak, 2002) which was almost the new Tarkovski coming from Turkey; a deep deep study of the human condition in the post revolution, deception in our daily coca cola consumption. But most than anything it was cinema thank you.
Later Ceylan stroked the ball in a very disappointing way, he tried to be a Brad Pitt in front of his lens becoming lame as hell, with Climates (Iklimler, 2006) on the side of his wife Ebru Ceylan (who is with him in the good and the bad times). Climates was an egocentric vanity mirror exercise worst than Vincent Gallo’s: The Brown Bunny (2003).
But now Nuri Bilge Ceylan is back with a vengeance with Three Monkeys (Üç maymun) which greatly affect me in it’s mirror political weather with my country Mexico, he wrote it with his wife Ebru.
Eyüp (Yavuz Bingol) goes to jail to protect Servet (Ercan Kesal) his boss. Hacer (Hatice Aslan) Eyüp’s wife lives with Ismail (Rifat Sungar) their son, she starts an affair with Servet with bad consequences when Eyüp comes out of jail.
Ceylan has constructed a political poem with menacing thunders in the distance, a meta film where symbols can be read in so many ways, a polymeric tunnel of monotone color correction with some humor film drops (not funny enough to laugh) in a devastating modern tragedy.
But what really turn me on about this movie was it’s protagonist Hacer played by Hatice Aslan, it has been a while since I have seen such a wonderful work, full of little textures that constructs a magical painting of sense and sensibilities, constructing stairways that drone and hurt, touch and push away, take care and patiently wait the distant thunder of what waits for us in the coming times.

The paradise is lost again

2008-11-21T13:16:00.001-08:00

Delta (Kornél Mundruczó, 2008) is building a house in the middle of a lake where two siblings can fall in love, taking back the paradise lost by force. A contemplative meditation with drones, hypnotical ambient sound, rearranged folk strings that make the soul move in different directions along the water waves. Using the same set of cloths forever, growing your hair while working the wood, drinking alcohol until is time to return to the little town for more, where everybody looks at you in a bad way.
Mihail (Félix Lajkó) returns home to a little town next to a marshland, with the help of his re appeared sister Fauna (Orsolya Tóth) he buys some wood and starts to build an isolated house. The town’s people will not take much time to show their disapproval. The film clearly echoes Ingmar Bergman’s incest piece with a spider, Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel, 1961). But also resonates with Terrence Malick’s worlds, and as Malick pieces the film talks about the paradise lost, the innocence needed to find the way back, becoming a contemplative meditation of nature and passing time. But Delta is a tragedy where we have a hero that transgress an order and he gets punished by that order, in the middle of a festivity that was about a beginning. What could have happened if he had brake the order but from the roots, if he was escaping from society and all its rules what about stopping drinking. What could have happened if he had used the life savior? If he had just invited the turtle to the festivities?

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

2008-11-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

The Edge of Heaven (Faith Akin, 2007) is a study on how people that meant to meet each other are not forced to meet for sure, they can cross paths physically, have the same acquaintances, but never meet. People who do risky things can find freedom while people who live a normal life can loose everything in a blink of an eye, a wrong turn that destroys their taken care life.
Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is Turkish, he lives in Germany, he drinks a lot and likes to bet; one time walking in the red light district he gets lucky and finds a Turkish prostitute: Yeter (Nursel Kose). Ali falls in love with Yeter and takes her home to live with him, she is also menaced by a radical Muslim group about being a prostitute while being Turkish. Soon tragedy arrives, in this film every time tragedy arrives it happens from a place you weren’t waiting for, it surprises you.
Nejat (Baki Davrak) is Ali’s son and this tragedy sends him to Turkey in search of Ayten Öztürk aka Gül (Nurgül Yesilçay), Yeter’s daughter who is a hardcore revolutionary. Gül is forced to travel to Germany at the same time without Nejat knowing, she even sleeps in his classroom while he is teaching the reason why Goethe didn’t support the revolution. One day Gül is walking in the University campus starving, she starts to ask for money, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) appears in her way and they start a very deep relationship. Tragedy arrives once more.
Pay Attention to the philosophical camera traveling movements that include the searcher and the one being searched in times of the movie that we have seen before but from a different angle. Revolution, frustration, vice, work here as links between lonely people who are looking for something without knowing it. Both tragedies work here for father and son to find their mother land, for Gül to find her mother, and for us to find the absurdity of colonialism in any presentation, it can take the form of globalization, a corporation, even a Hollywood movie.

Money, Money, Money

2008-11-15T12:26:00.000-08:00

Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008) is a very bad movie in which a wonderful actor is turn to act like a Steven Segal for the bucks.
Luc Besson used to direct very decent action films (Nikita, Léon) that almost reached a poetic level still being commercial flicks that did very well at the box office. Besson was a young and modern Jean Pierre Melville, but now that he is producing he goes for the bucks, yes he does, and you know what? he gets the bucks: everybody is endocrine to like this filth. Think about every cliché of girl lost, father figure looking for her (Hardcore, Frantic, etc…) and then think about all the clichés from the worst action movies and voila!
A guy who collects girls in Paris' airport for a prostitution ring, who obviously has never done any acrobatic act in his life, jumps to a trailer from a bridge: a long jump, in that moment (that is suppose to be very tense, zzzzzzz) you totally know that he is going to go straight to the street turn to look at Liam Neeson and then be run over by a car, guess what? It happens mill metrically just how you envisioned it.

By the way Luc Besson also wrote it.

Borrow or steal a camera if you don´t own one, but start recording NOW!!! You got a distribution deal for free in the internet...

2008-11-10T07:25:00.000-08:00

In Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008) the director finally finds the translation between his music video imaginary and commercial cinema, he can control Jack Black expressiveness and brings out from Mos Def a heartily performance.

Elroy Fletcher (Danny Glover) is the owner of a video store that rents only vhs, he has to go away on business and leaves the store in the hands of Mike (Mos Def). Jerry (Jack Black) tries to do an impossible sabotage to a microwave installation (it seems more an excuse for the best gag in the year, about camouflage) and gets magnetized. When Jerry visits Mike to the video store he deletes all the information from the rental tapes. Soon they start to record home made versions of the blockbuster hits that everyone wants to rent trying to emulate the reality, but their creations are better than the originals and soon they have the store full of costumers who want to rent more of this original creations, long live the low-fi!
Every time Mike and Jerry start a new production the whole movie turns into this art piece, expressive homage to a blockbuster movie, that is a the same time entertaining and interesting as a provocative technical performance.

The whole building property of Elroy Fletcher is menaced by the corporation to be turn into pieces, because they don’t like old buildings, let’s turn everything look alike.
Elroy Fletcher goes in a tour to get ideas from the corporation in the regular video stores on how to operate, getting ideas like having fewer titles with more copies, just divide everything into two categories and get rid of film genres. Mike and Jerry make Elroy return to his humanity and also promise on saving the building via their film productions that every time become more successful.

Be Kind Rewind is a gentle cry against the corruption system that rules this planet, an artistic manifest with the low-fi as a flag, a showcase of hope for the artists that try to survive in this cruel-cruel world, a movie where every character’s motivation is not an egocentrically objective, a reminder that the digital revolution is out there stronger than ever for everyone, a colorful document of humanity before we all are turn into robots. Brbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I can't see my Tiramisú

2008-11-02T18:08:00.001-08:00

Blindness (Fernando Meirelles, 2008) tries to be a metaphor of the moment that we are living; in a land of blind people one who can see would be king, but that´s not true: “the one who has the gun, he is the king”, the metaphor fails trying to expand the box office.
A doctor (Mark Ruffalo) that works on people´s eyes, goes blind, as most of the population that start to get moved on a quarantine process to a prison, the wife of the doctor (Juliane Moore) doesn't go blind but pretends to be blind just to be with him. Behind bars, the king of ward 3 (Gael García Bernal) is going to make their life a hell, that is even worse for the only person who sees, the doctor´s wife who becomes a sort of Ralph of a blind version of Lord of the Flies (William Golding, 1954) fighting for the light inside darkness, a strong leader who helps them get free.
The talented cinematographer César Charlone works again with Meirelles but this time they don´t exercise being fancy with the lenses and camera movements just to generate eye candy on the screen, there is a practical reason: supporting the objective subjective blind perception in camera motifs that become lyrical.
This is the adaptation of José Saramago's book, that I haven´t read myself but the screenplay has many problems, that make almost unbearable to watch all the prison part, when they get out starts to be interesting again but everytime this movie starts to get interesting the story falls into Hollywood structures that we have seen a thousand times and is just so boring. We are missing Meirelles directing a good screenplay as The Constant Gardner (Meirelles, 2005) is.
But Mark Ruffalo is better than ever, Gael García Bernal splendid, and what to say about Julianne Moore she builds a character that lingers fondly in our perception like the new woman that comes with a new century. Where is she?

Viagra is not a candy, and definitely not for children

2008-10-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

How does the perfect daughter becomes a prostitute? But not just that, also a pimp with a very successful enterprise: baby sitting and hooking at the same time.

The Babysitters (David Ross, 2007) combines the imaginary of a movie like Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983) with the conflict of a teenage contest drama of a movie like Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999), having almost inter-dimensional atmospheric parlors a la Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992) but staying on the realistic side with elegant comedy flashes on the height of the best American Indy film.
Shirley Lyner (Katherine Waterston) is a high school student that works as a babysitter who happens to be working for Mr. Michael Beltran (John Leguizamo, also producer of the film) that suffers from not having someone to share his love for train models. Shirley starts sharing his passion and not only for trains: inside a classic train car that previously he wanted to show to his wife they have sex, all starts with one of the sexier kisses of the year. From there it starts for Shirley, with a 200 dollar tip that she receives after having sex with him, in agreement of not having anything serious; Shirley sees the opportunity to have a full grant in a very prestigious University. Shirley starts to have more clients, receiving the extra money with the extra activities and soon she has her friends working for her, giving her a percentage, starting a company called THE BABYSITTERS with business cards and everything.
How long is it going to take for the wives of these men to understand why does their husbands want to drive home the nannies so badly?
David Ross had showed before his talent as a writer with a teenage horror film about witchcraft in an isolated boarding school for girls with The Woods (Lucky McKee, 2006), that if it had some debt with classic genre films like Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) it was a very sustain piece with strong characters and truthful atmosphere. In The Babysitters, directing for the first time and also writing it, he turns inside out clichés (Mrs. Robinson) and shows us a female character that goes against all rules, exploiting an hypocrite society and having a revenge against a system that doesn’t work. Shirley throws away everything that she was teach to do as a “honorable girl” following their own values: you have to get a good education if you want to be someone in life. She finds the truth behind the paper walls of her environment, but finding the truth is not always enjoyable it’s painful but makes you finally open your eyes to what is in front of you, not what you want to see that is not there. The film is a mix of tones that work because of it’s believable characters that neither are good or bad, they are real; in that way is a very exciting film to watch, full of surprises.
Strangely Leguizamo fought to keep his clothes on during the sex scenes: "I wanted it to be more in your mind. I didn't want to do nudity in the film, maybe it's my ex-Catholic nature but I found it too much, so we kept our clothes on and the sex was in your own dirty mind." Strangely the scenes play more dirty with the little cherries' underwear of a girl that is not a woman yet, what we can see of her body is wet with sweat, she's together with a respected member of the society that should be telling her that what she is doing is wrong but instead continues melting the place down with her, keeping his shirt on of course.

The Fear or the Love for God

2008-09-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

Teresa: The Body of Christ (Ray Loriga, 2007) is the spiritual eroticism that made a Saint look like a Satan worshipper in the eyes of the inquisition through slow enveloping push-ins; mystical raptures that make the camera spin inside the chiaroscuro lightened sets where the ready for museum wardrobe designs by Eiko Ishioka (Dracula, 1992), shine like fallen stars wanting to ascend to heaven.
Ray Loriga the successful young writer who directed his first film in 1995, My Brother’s Gun, after his bestseller book, supported by a magnificent production by Andrés Vicente Gómez, helps Paz Vega finally reach her fate: “becoming the most attractive Spanish actress for a serious production”. Paz Vega sustains the frame in each scene, the character progression is arduous as Saint Teresa’s journey was; the strong features of Paz Vega face, her stoic gestures cut the candle lights, like the knife cuts the bread, with a graze that melts them gently.

Saint Teresa of Jesus was a revolutionary leader, that open the way with a combination of imagination, faith and devotion in the 1500’s, she made a reform inside the church without dividing it. Saint Teresa of Ávila is the ultimate detective in a mystical hardboiled, the last man standing, she dives into herself in her surroundings searching for God; he escapes from her like the Beatles from their groupies in London’s streets, in a Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964), while the inquisition starts to be suspicious about her activities.

Teresa runs through old corridors in a sort of Derek Jarman version in Haute couture; infinite tunnels unfold at her feet, dissolving in carved doors as her ideas about God change into real feelings; her crush morphs into an uncontrollable passion that evolves into real love, becoming the Universe and finally melting in ONE. José Luis Alcaine (Volver, 2006) graceful camera runs after Teresa, like God being ignored by her; both travel the silk labyrinth that ends up being made of stone, where Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) or Jack Torrance from the Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) could appear in any second.

The Land of the Ready Dead

2008-09-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000) was an absurd piece of social criticism against the society that almost end up the carrier of Roy Andersson as a director earlier, with the reception that his movie Giliap (1975) had. Since then he only almost does advertisement, but the kind of advertisement that a person like Roy Andersson would do, characters with a white face, talking nonsense with a sense of crazy selling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ofPRv29RMs

You, the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007) is an extension to Songs, but he goes even more lyrically minimalistic and less musical in appearance, the music is absorbed inside the textures of a production design that leaves you out of breath, inside the compositions where early works of Aki Kaurismaki and Jim Jarmusch come to mind and the Butoh dance mise en scene.

A Scandinavian Mad magazine on Valium with vodka, a series of farcical pieces on ice, a mist of sadness that levitates on the set making the lights glow while the backgrounds celebrates in a sort of children book design, reminding us for a minute of the Brecht in plastic of Smoking / No Smoking (Alain Resnais, 1993). But this film is not about taking decisions, it is about living a life in formol wearing a skin that the sun light doesn't touch. A requiem for an economic system that left alone a society giving them all the material stuff that money can buy but submerged in alcoholism and a general clinical depression.
A multiple characters work where the main one is the city of Stockholm, Sweden; and the guitar riffs that Micke plays in a dream where a house becomes a train, a dream where people smile. Orchestrated rhythm between the scenes and inside them, striking choreographies even in the smallest detail of the celebrating-celebrated background.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mic33pjvdU&feature=related

How to feel

2008-09-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

Arráncame la Vida (Roberto Sneider, 2008) is the lost of innocence of a teenage girl at the same time that is the lost of innocence of a country that was built over corruption, from corruption within corruption.
When Catalina Guzman (Ana Claudia Talancon) is 16 years old she’s “taken” as wife by the macho big mustache General Andrés Asencio (Giménez Cacho) who shows her how to have sex but not “how to feel”, for that Catalina is helped by a witch who later will help her also to stop feeling. Catalina is raised by the General and slowly learns how everything works in her 1932 Mexico, where power and greed are the drives that put everything in motion, and everything is permitted if you know the right people. Catalina later finds love in the arms of Carlos Vives (Jose Maria de Tavira), an orchestral conductor who also happens to be the first person that she meets who thinks beyond what he wants for himself, including the human rights of the working class, and of course he is no good for that society.
Arráncame la Vida is running away from clichés in a world populated by them, a love story about how not to love and try to get what you want instead, a nostalgic glimpse into an era that never existed as we remember it.
Roberto Sneider (Dos Crimenes, 1995) took twelve years from his last film, which also was his first to direct his second one, in the mean time he produced the very successful Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002), the twelve years are translated into a very meticulous production of epic proportions in it’s outdoor scenes, but they work just to situate us into an era where is important to be, the movie is far from being a David Lean Magnus spectacle of dramatic proportions, it has more to do with an Ibsen piece but very Mexican. Mexican in its characters, Mexican in its reactions, Mexican in its true logic, Mexican in it’s violence (nobody know who killed him but everybody knows), Mexican in its humor. Not Mexican in it’s tone in the classic notion, this is far from being a Melodrama or a simple comedy of turn arounds this is very painful and ironic humor where we recognize ourselves and also the very intelligent protagonist who even if she knows a lot she never does anything to make better the situation.
Sneider has worked with successful Mexican books adaptations for his two films, in the first case is Dos Crímenes by Jorge Ibargüengoitia and this time Arráncame la Vida by Ángeles Mastretta; he respects the books very much and uses them like excuses to talk about deep Mexican conditions, he does this in a very cold way, putting everything inside the scene and then backing up just shooting it. It plays like a hyper real caricature where it really hurts to laugh.
Like every great film it works in many levels, in a deep level it goes for a violent critique and in a superficial level it will be a commercial success, it is a very funny and sexy flick.

I'M HERE

2008-09-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) is a cubist painting, made with light, about the biggest iconoclast of the 60´s era and is also an elegy about that era in itself.
Robert Allen Zimmerman walked a very tough road to become Bob Dylan but he never stopped evolving from one character to the next character that he created, like a serpent leaving different changes of skin behind, reinventing himself every week. Todd Haynes tries to find a cinematic correspondence to the genius, helped with the magical lights and virtuous use of lenses by Ed Lachman (Erin Brockovich 00, Ken park 02) he goes for it in an expressionistic event of artistic proportions, a puzzle explosion of politics, poetics, symbolisms, faith, freedom, eroticism, drugs, music, movement, slavery, fight, color, just as Bob Dylan songs are. Dylan never stop evolving, changing, even if that meant loosing fans and earning enemies; in I’m Not There we have many actors playing Dylan in each one of his incarnations: Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Marcus Carl Franklin, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw. The different Dylans don’t make sense next to each other, they are a paradox, and that is the only way to truly portrait his genius. Every Dylan is played like a different reality where everything changes: cinematography, acting tone, production design, and that’s the only way that the puzzle works. At the same time the movie never stops paying homage to movies of the era like 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) or Sympathy for the Devil (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968) making us clear that Dylan is just the Virgilio in this Divine Napalm memories of a frightful comic agenda.

Safety? What about eating every day?

2008-09-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

Simon Bross has been directing TV commercials for too long in Mexico, and finally he has decided to make his first feature, like every commercial director in Mexico this is like a utopia that never arrives, or when it arrives is a catastrophe like in the case of Jorge Aguilera with his About the Living (2001). If well Bad Habits (Simon Bross, 2007) falls sometimes into a commercial aesthetic that doesn’t help to create tension between the character interactions (most of the times the camera is trying to be so fancy that it leaves behind the dramatic moments), and sometimes even the actions of the characters are not clear; I’m talking about commercial director vices that Simon can’t get out of the way; but he also creates a magical atmosphere, a tough one to pull off. It has to do with one of the main characteristics of Mexico City and that has been here since the beginning and will be here after the end, the rain, wonderfully lighten making it part of the narration in most of the scenes; sometimes he goes into the commercial vices and come out in another place a much more cinematographic one, he transcends the commercial through the commercial. An example would be when he really goes for it in the scene shot from outside the house where we can see the characters walking to the basement where the new running machine is and their dialogue is clear as if we were in the same room with them, but they are so removed from each other like the Barbie house in which they live in from them. That Barbie house where we think that the first problem in Mexico is the social safety, and we don´t even realize about poverty matters and social differences in front of our own noses.
Elena de Haro´s incarnation of an obsessive-compulsive anorexic mother of a little girl that happens to be not as slim as her mother wants her to be is outstanding. Elena´s wonderful work full of different textures gives the film a deepness rarely seen in our cinema; true character and conflict via a different route a much more subtle one.