The Face Knife

(just a short squib, even though everything here is still not 100%. For more ephemeral stuff, visit How’s Yr Face? until stuff gets reorganized here.

The 800+ Year-Old Virgin, or, We are all idiot man-children now, even the robots.

Even though I really liked Wall-E, and though it was adorable and clever and fun, I have this irresistable urge to start cutting on it. Basically, my problem with Wall-E is that the heteronormative romance projected onto the robot protagonists is just another variation on the schlub/hottie dynamic that has been ruling romantic comedies in TV and movie formats for years. I mean, think about it:

(trying not to really SPOIL anything by spelling it out).

1.) Lonely male robot living by himself with a collection of odd pop culture ephemera.

2.) Lonely male robot has a menial job obviously beneath his skills.

3.) Meets cute with a much more put-together, driven and dynamic (not to mention more aerodynamically designed) female.

4.) Who somehow unaccountably falls for him, even though he is capable of communicating his feelings on the most basic and primal level.

5.) Then, he puts his seed in her.

6.) They’re separated by her career

7.) He has to win her back through haphazard though valiant effort.

8.) Which of course works, but only because:

9.) he gains a supporting cast of even more schlubby defectives who help him , and:

10.) the love of a hot chick inspires a loser man-child to face up to it, and do great deeds.

11.) She gives up her career for him.

This begs for a chart of some sort. Sigh. Too bad I gave up on doing that.

Director Mike Mills’ first film Thumbsucker fails to gel as either a comedy or a “slice of life”, and it’s hard not to fault the directorial choices. A decent cast including the always fabulous Tilda Swinton cannot bring the material life with the flat, affectless way the film is shot, save for a few interludes like a rip-off of Rushmore’s deathless “You Are Forgiven” soundtrack moment. Compared to other low-budget indie films like You and Me and Everyone We Know, Thumbsucker looks awful, and with the story, such as it is, in service of a pedestrian idea about solipsism and the frailties of human life, there’s not much about the film to recommend.

Thumbsucker is yet another indie-ish movie about the desire for and inability to attain true intimacy or recognition, but fails to get off the ground by establishing any sort of relationships between the characters. The teenage subject-position is thrust into the standard adolescent alienation without any sense that he’s at all in the world. When compared with a film like last year’s I Heart Huckabees, Thumbsucker is lifeless and draining. David O. Russell’s film, which is destined to become a classic, stirs in moments of high absurdity with it’s questions about human connections, which I think is what Thumbsucker is trying to do with the Keanu Reeves character, an new-agey orthodontist who goes through some sort of metamorphosis to a nihilist, trying to cover the Dustin Hoffman/Isabelle Huppert poles of Huckabees with one character. But one receives few clues on how to take the Reeves character - the stuff about Power Animals is of course ridiculous but the audience isn’t inclined to laugh.

Thumbsucker makes some obvious and facile points about drug addiction and, well, coming to terms with your thumbsucking (ie, in the words of the film, not judging your inside against other people’s outsides) but the appreciation and discovery of the Other’s private world still seems as remote as ever. If only I could find my power animal….

Tell me how in the comments, dear readers.

I haven’t read wunkerkind Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, and after seeing the Liev Schreiber directed film version, I have even less desire to. That’s not to say that the film of Everything… is utterly without merit; it’s just that most of the most annoying parts of the film seem to stem from the literary nature of the source, and that Schreiber was not a mature enough filmmaker to realize that faithfulness to a literary source is not a virtue.

Schreiber takes great pains to highlight the fact that his film has a literary pedigree - the film is divided into “chapters” which we see written by the narrator, a comic Ukrainian enthusiastic about negroes and “being carnal,” who is played by the frontman for infamous multicultural NYC party band Gogol Bordello, Eugene Hutz. Hutz is fabulous in a role that could very easily have been a disaster; supplied with idiot malapropisms by Foer which may be amusing on paper but are just repetitious and grating when spoken, he nonetheless maintains an aura of wide-naivity coupled with the knowingness of the slightly crooked huckster. It’s amazing that he can make this walking joke of an Eastern Bloc homeboy into a believable and sympathetic character, but he does it. I’m looking forward to seeing him in other films.

Elijah Wood is all glasses and pale skin in another role that’s more like an aggregate of quirks than an actual human being. He plays Jonathan Safran Foer, a deranged vegetarian who collects the detritus of his families everyday life so that he won’t forget where he came from.

This is my main problem with the film. It’s a philosophical problem and maybe I’m wrong, but Foer’s main thesis is that in order to live an engaged and moral life in the present we must be mindful of the past, yet his characters cannot engage with the past without a physical connection. The Collector’s Ziploc reliquaries are an extreme literalization of the desire to not let memory disappear, as if a person didn’t really exist unless someone remembers them. My life and your life should not be dependent on leaving something behind to be remembered; life is not to be lived for posterity, even if the goal is so noble as to preserve the memory of a village which has been wiped from the face of the earth. The fact that one character is more or less shamed to death because he has refused to remember and then is confronted with an all-too-physical reminder of his past is very nearly despicable - the frailty and tenuousness of the human enterprise is not acknowledged in any serious way. Our lives may be illuminated by the past, but they’re still our lives and not in servitude to our ancestors or spawn.

As a self-appointed critic, it is my duty to drain the fun out of everything and attempt to provide a reason why what you’re enjoying is not simply amusement but a more important and altogether cogent statement about Art and Life.

Then I’m confronted by something like Princess Racoon, which is altogether impossible to exhaust. 82 year old Japanese director Seijan Suzuki has taken a simple fairy tale story of a love that should not be and collaged it with a grab bag of visual and audio source materials, creating a mix of formalisms that would be annoying if it weren’t so exhilarating.

The forbidden love is between a “Tanuki” Princess, a mischievous forest demon who can assume bat, racoon-esque, and human form, and your standard young fairy-tale human prince, who has been banished by his father, master of Castle Grace, for threatening to usurp his place as “the fairest of them all.”

So far, this sounds like it could be the plot for a standard Hollywood CGI special effects blockbuster, but instead of using the latest cinematic technology to create a “realistic” version of what a fantastic world should be like, Suzuki uses what are more less ancient methods derived from theater to create the cinematic space. The horizon is delimited by backdrops that are reminiscent of wood-block prints, or simple composite shots. For instance, Castle Grace is a bare stage set with a large Gate, a crater, a baroque-looking oil painting, a purple sky background, and, lest I forget, human beings as candelabras and other furniture (the Master’s favorite way of torturing those who have disobeyed him - including his parents).

Most of the action itself takes place in similarly minimalist ways - combat consists of ritual exchanges of blows (and Suzuki takes this formalism to the last degree, culminating a duel to the death in a rock, paper, scissors contest, the most arch indication of the method to Suzuki’s madness).

I cannot help but think of Sergei Eisenstein’s thoughts on Kabuki theater in Film Form. Granted, I wouldn’t know Kabuki from Tanuki, and I have no idea if Eisenstein’s thoughts were actually correct, but his description of the conventions of Kabuki in the forms of gestures, costume, background and sound, and how they are all treated equally as units of theater, were instrumental in constructing his program for the Sound Film. In one example Eisenstein gives, long-distance travel is indicated on stage first through a movement toward the front of the stage, then a change in a folding screen backdrop to denote perspective, a clothe obscuring that screen to denote that the starting place had vanished, and finally, samisen music of a certain rhythm.

However, to me, rather than the montage techniques for which Eisenstein was justly famous, this type of formalism has the opposite effect of the time and space distorting effects of montage. Montage is discontinuous - in Princess Racoon, even though the scene may change, it’s still linked to the same (magical) world. Tanuki Palace opens it’s doors to several different parts of the world, all at once. It is a nexus of cinematic continuity - the camera can track out of Tanuki palace and onto the beach, into the forest, up to the forbidden mountain.

Going back to the fight scenes again, these are also examples of a preference for all-overness rather than montage. In the fights (as well as the many dance sequences) , there is a prescribed area that the actors move through - their motions render depth of field visible to the viewer, and seem all that more exciting and ‘real’ for it - even though they’re so formalized. Contrast to the standard “fight scene” of contemporary film - the constant cuts, the close ups of hand and claw in a dizzying spectacle that disorients but doesn’t excite. The editing used in those scenes I would say is completely uncinematic, which is sad because human combat is such a great subject for film, to show off the way the lens captures reality. In the only other Suzuki film I’ve seen, Youth of the Beast, he uses depth photography very effectively, in static compositions as well as action.

This is not to say that Princess Racoon is a dry exercise in experimental cinema. In fact, it’s uproarious, fun, and silly, with a magic bowl of eggnog, a Ninja named Ostrich and many, many songs in many, many styles. It’s not necessary to think about technique and what it might mean when viewing the film, but it gives me a little to talk about.

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Filmbrain, where I was tipped off to the existence of this film, has a great review today, much better than mine at getting across the fun of the film.

Anyone have any ideas for illustrations? I’m sort of at a loss…. Frog of Paradise?

Okay, what’s the deal with the explicit Christianity of the denizens of Castle Grace? Ideas?
I’m going to continue to edit this today, and maybe add a cartoon.

Miranda July’s new film Me and You and Everyone We Know is a film about the sometimes creepy, sometimes cloying, most of the time awkward things we do when we’re trying to establish a connection with someone. Intimacy with other human beings, in both the physical and emotional sense, is the only escape from solipsism, and when that intimacy is taken away, because of the dissolution of a relationship, or, you know, death, the way we recover (or don’t) touches every other part of our lives. These themes are shared by another 2005 film on my Summer Movie Comparison Chart, Todd Solondz’s Palindromes (another thing the films share is bucking the ongoing someone being tied to a chair and tortured trend). But where Solondz seems to indicate strongly that this kind of connection is a chimera, or that, for the most part, we’re too damaged to ever truly experience it and have to sublimate it through other things (mostly sex), July’s winsome comedy wants you to believe that those connections are already present out there, waiting, all over the place. Me and You… is like Solondz served sunny-side up, with a bacon smile. And toast ears. And then you make the bacon say funny things to your brunch partner. In funny voices.

In a movie this clever and funny, the world (and the people in it) is of course redeemable - there is an essential sweetness at the core of each character, no matter how outwardly oblivious or perverted. You can tell by the production design (decor and props reminiscent of the shabby cute of Wes Anderson’s films or Napolean Dynamite, but a more cynical critic would probably include the adorable biracial children in this category). Your shitty circumstances can be reversed or transcended through interaction with other people. There’s no need for a “time out”, as asked for by one character. Change is immediately and readily available, if you’re open to it.

This is a problem. For me. My main argument against Solondz’s comedies is that he doesn’t love his characters enough (though he inched toward that with beautiful results in Palindromes. July has the opposite problem: she obviously loves her characters too much. This might be a function of how she writes - in an interview I read recently (in I believe “res” magazine) she talks about how she builds character and lives with them, and the process seems like something that would be degrading if one were to do it with a mostly unredeemable or despicable character. Even arts curators can be saved, in July’s world.

Loving your characters this much makes the world too complete, too round. Possibility for redemption implies a character ‘arc’ structure, a model of storytelling I tend to discount in the service of “serious” subjects. It’s hard for me to take the film seriously philosophically when the world is so twee. Out of “everyone we know,” everyone is a secret snuggler, and I say to that Nay. It would be kind of hell to live in a world where people are spontaneously participating in little art projects or where cuddle parties are liable to break out at the drop of a guard. Over-arching sincerity is not necessarily a good thing, for art or relationships (cf McSweeneys/Believer, for all their virtues).

Still, Me and You… is worth seeing, because it’s at times an absolutely hilarious film, and I have an instinct to support artists like July, an indie lifer with a resum? like the heroine from a Belle and Sebastian song (She was on K Records, for christ’s sake). In wil be interesting to see what she could do with a more professional cast and more confidence in her ability to see a project to fruition, though a lack of confidence in her material and ability is certainly not in evidence on screen, a marked contrast to her presence at the Q&A session at the brand new IFC Center where I saw the film. July in person is endearingly awkward, which i suspect may be part of a persona because she’s been performing in public for years and at this point has had a lot of positive feedback for the film, including winning the Camera d’Or at Cannes. All I know is, she didn’t take kindly to my suggestion that she conduct the balance of the session using the hilarious “guy” voice she puts on during the film, and because of that I went home disappointed.

——

The IFC Center seems like it will be a great addition to New York’s movie house line-up. I didn’t get a long time to poke around, as I was almost late to the film and out front was a giant inflatable rat and the projectionists union, who were protesting. The interior decor of the theatre reminded me of a “hip” coffee shop circa 1991, all exposed brick and ductwork. The programming looks interesting - unfortunately, I had to miss the first repertory offering (Ozu) this weekend. Before each film, a short will be shown (yes!), which will change each week. I’m looking forward to the character of the place evolving and becoming apparent.

Hypothetically speaking, if I were to tell you that I really liked and respected a film, because I thought it was realistic, and I used the term realistic without any irony or other ulterior motive - speaking totally sincerely here, - and I would want to see it again sometime, just me and it, just - hypothetically speaking - would you get weird on me the next time we hung out? No, no, that’s okay. I’m sorry. i didn’t mean to put you in that position. Sorry. Let’s just forget it. Why that long face? Are you going to get weird on me? Weren’t we having a good time, talking about movies? Can’t we still have a good time? Not that I would want to force you to have a good time… No, I’m NOT FUCKING WITH YOU!

Funny Ha Ha is a story about people who can never say what they really mean when they really mean it, because they’re so concerned with hurting other people’s feelings that their own emotions are submerged under a series of verbal and physical tics. Case in point is Marnie (Kate Dollenmeyer), an aimless 23 year old college grad who can’t stop apologizing for having feelings, and who can’t stop touching her face like an even coltishier version of Wiley Wiggins in “Dazed and Confused” (though the characters probably have a little more in common with Linklater’s Slacker, though, you know, not as smug and isolationist. Or is that me?)

Marnie has a crush on Alex, this computer programmer boy, and everybody knows about it, including Alex. When Alex finally becomes apparently available, Marnie is too afraid of rejection and “things being weird” to make a move on him. Although her feelings for Alex linger, abetted by the most aggressive passive aggressive behavior ever committed to film, she tries to work them out through a checklist of self-improvement projects like “don’t drink for a month,” “go outside more often,” “learn to play chess,” and everyone’s favorite “fitness initiative!!”[sic], along with a friendship with a former coworker, Mitchell (played by the film’s writer and director, Andrew Bujalski) who thinks he is hopelessly in love with her and whom she is just using for attention, though she probably doesn’t even know that.

There was this awful buzz-phrase going on a few years ago called “quarter-life” crisis, and if it weren’t denigrating to the film I would slap it on it, but unfortunately, that sort of sums up the simultaneously transient yet static nature of a lot of people’s post-collegiate experience. Lives and emotions are in flux, yet they seem strangely caught in patterns. Maybe you’re still living with your college girlfriend even though you think you have a crush on one of your other friends, like one of the characters in the film. Maybe you’re prematurely burned out with your job. Maybe the only way you can express emotions is by acting like a child in public.

I don’t want to spoil how the film ends, because the final scene cuts off quite unexpectedly and in my opinion, quite brilliantly. I would hope it cuts off just before Marnie stops submerging her emotions and finally “calls bullshit” on the way other people treat her, the little and big slights and general disrespectful behavior that we think we have to put up to remain friends with someone. In fact, in my “director’s cut” of the film, it ends with her plunging her hand deep into the chest cavity of one of the other characters, pulling out his heart and showing it to him, her face spattered with little drops of blood. But maybe that’s because the last couple of movies I saw in the theater included Oldboy, Sin City and Save the Green Planet, and want this film to fit in with them in my summer movie chart. ( though, apparently, this film has been on cable and was premiered at film festivals in 2003 - hah! Don’t have to include it!)
Funny Ha Ha is currently playing at Cinema Village in New York City, in a Lilliputian screening room.)

The only way yesterday could have gotten more twee is if I were wearing mittens and holding hands with Jonathan Richman. Whimsy’s fuzzy fingered fist held sway over a dreary, rainy day in New York City as I took in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and after the film headed to Pete’s Candy Store to catch a performance by Au Revoir Simone, to which we were very, very early. After some grumbling precipitated by intensely uncomfortable humidity and a woman with an acoustic guitar performing “Where is My Mind?” (which followed up “Luka,” of course) we settled in to the womb-like atmosphere of the stage area of the horribly laid-out Pete’s, to catch relaxing sets by goofy raconteur Ethan Lipton and shoegazy Hula.

The stage at Pete’s is TINY, reminding me of the video for Tom Waits’s “I don’t want to grow up”, though Ethan Lipton’s Orchestra had little trouble fitting in, as it consisted solely of a Ukelele player. Lipton kept admirably straightfaced throughout his often very funny songs - I can only imagine that his heavy mustache held a functional as well as aesthetic purpose, the weight of hair keeping his mouth from curling into a smile. His best songs were about running away with a woman at a Ren Faire, who turned out to be a one-eyed, toothless, one-legged whore, and the one where he told us about his magic trick called “Happy!” I wouldn’t necessarily recommend anyone buy one of his CDs, because I suspect there’s only a limited number of times one can appreciateand enjoy a song about how Whitney Houston corrupted “sweet Bobby Brown,” but it made for a relaxing evening…

Which got even more relaxing once Hula took the stage and played their druggy rock to an enthusiastic crowd. You really couldn’t get more early 90s than Hula - short name, girl bass player with a short haircut, jazzmaster and reverb, and I’m a sucker for that shoe-gazy stuff. The lead singer had an un-twee appearance - he looked more like a linebacker than badminton hero, and he had a deeper voice that didn’t verge into the histrionics one would expect. The bass player could not stop smiling - she was adorable, just like…

Au Revoir Simone, about whom the nastiest thing I could possibly say was that they took a long, long time to set up their battery of keyboards and fabulous music machines, were of course their willowly, pretty selves. I’d only heard one song they played prior to this set, so I have no idea what the names were, but they most effective numbers sounded like a more skeletal human league and featured some surprising and effective compositional turns, like Heather playing drum pads during the coda of one song. Their lyrics, from what I could tell, seem a lot about learning to love yourself, which we all know is the greatest love of all, and Whitney Houston, can’t you learn your own lesson and leave poor Bobby Brown alone?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) is the cutest space adventure since Carrie Fisher braided her hair and joined a tree-top teddy bear picnic, but this cute, thankfully, never gets cloying, even when the mice start talking. Maybe the whimsy is balanced by the manic, unhinged energy of Sam Rockwell, who plays literally half-brained Galatic President Zapod Beeblebrox, a strutting, preening pretty boy with Allman-esque hair and a 1000-watt smile, or the oddly Ford Prefect, played by that rapper with the twee-est warddrobe, Mos Def. Two things are for certain: if you are looking for someone to play befuddled sweetness or the sweetly befuddled, the only person you have to call is Martin Freeman (Tim from “The Office”), who plays bathrobed earth-man Arthur Dent, and if you’re looking for saucer-eyed cuteness, Zooey Deschanel could not be more adorable unless she was knit from fuzzy wool.

Although I enjoyed all the performances, (and I have to keep listing to include Alan Rickman as the voice of droid whose cuteness makes R2D2 look like a puddle of puke) the film felt more like a prologue than a self-contained narrative. The plot, as such, is more or less unresolved, leaving a lot of questions for the inevitable sequels, which I would go see. The effects are quite good, especially breathtaking when Arthur is taking a tour of a planet-building facility. I can only hope the sequels will maintain all that was good about this film and tighten up the story and ratchet up the latent humanist and atheist elements of the story.