The Face Knife

Is Cinderella Man worth seeing for free?

Ultimately, the goal of this web site is to attract attention from the right people so that I can go see movies for free… I would watch nearly anything for free (at this point; I’m sure I would get sick of it) and hell, write something about it. I mean, I wrote about Sith, right?

So I sort of feel duty-bound to take advantage of this offer this weekend, go watch Russell Crowe beat the crap out of people/get the crap beaten out of him, complain and get my money back, and report back here. Is that the “right” thing to do?

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.

I was tagged by Tribe, and I thought this would be a good way to introduce some of my taste and what I’ve been watching to people who are reading this blog who don’t know me. So:

1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video.
hmmm…50? 75? No idea really….they’re in binders to save space.

2. Last film I bought.
Hah, well, I just ordered some grey-market DVDs from www.superhappyfun.com. (hey, if it’s good enough for Jonathan Rosenbaum…) So, Paris Nous Appartient (Rivette), Mouchette (Bresson), Made in USA and La Chinoise Godard. Damn, that’s French

3. Last film I watched.
Foolish Wives (von Stroheim, 1922) Anyone have a copy of Greed they want to send me?

Okay, after I started this I watched Blonde Venus and Trouble in Paradise as a double feature at Film Forum’s: Paramount: Before the Code festival. If anyone has any ideas of what else I should see from that list, let me know, please. Trouble in Paradise is incredibly funnny….I might write about that one but I don’t think I have anything to offer…

4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order).
The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin) - Probably my favorite movie right now. I’m kind of obsessed with Maddin, even though this is the one film of his (besides a few of the shorts) that I’ve seen that I really think works…

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Lang) - I liked this one better than Dr. Mabuse der Spieler and M, though I think I watched M too early in my cinema education (like, last fall) to “get” the sound design of it, which is one the the things I love about Testament. The Testament is a really oddly edited film, with lots of scenes going on longer and abruptly bleeding into other scenes. If I were ever to edit a movie, this would be my bible.

The Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson) - Such a beautiful film, visually and philosophically. Also, great sound design.

Woman is a Woman (Godard) - Total joycore pop movie love. Again with the sound editing.

Chinatown (Polanski) - masterclass in plot. If I were to write a film, this is one of the ones I would study religiously.

Also: Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky) - the “bell casting” sequence. The most powerful series of images ever committed to film. Indelible and exhaustive in the terror and exhiliration of creation

5. If you could be any character portrayed in a movie, who would it be?
Indiana Jones, of course.

Tagged: whoever is reading this, but particularly holzfallen, one armed emma p (hah! though it might be redundant considering 3 of the above are things you recommended to me - but still do it!), munt, cb, flyboy, eppy (because I liked your book one…don’t know how into film you are) … post in my comment, if you’d like.

Imagine a polyphonic ringtone, stomping on a human face - forever.

Not to be too alarmist, but - mobile phones, work of the devil, right? In addition to ruining more classic plot devices than any invention besides DNA testing*, this illusion of being constantly plugged into a communications grid - is this wise? I mean, what kind of person wants to be available all the time? Not the kind of person I want calling me, that’s for sure.

Mobile phones might wreck some suspense plots but as a trope they’ve been sorely underutilized in film fiction. Until that high school text-messaging sex comedy starring Hillary Duff that we’ve all been waiting for comes out, we’ve got to settle with Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke’s The World.

The World is a narrative about the deforming effects the availability and control of technology have on the younger generation of Chinese**,told in the setting of an amusement park outside of Beijing that reproduces famous world-wide landmarks at reduced scale. You can see the skyline of New York (still complete with the Twin Towers about the height of two Yao Mings standing on each other’s shoulders),- The Eiffel Tower at 1/3 scale, and a miniature Taj Mahal.

While no Baudrillard has been (or will be) harmed in the making of this essay, I’d like to bring up his closest North American analogue, familiar to you all from his guest spot in Annie Hall, Marshall McLuhan. In McLuhan’s terms, a “media” is an ‘extension of man’ - anything that extends our senses or capabilities. In simplest terms, radio is an extension of our hearing, and automobiles (also a media according to McLuhan) extend our sense of touch/ability to act in the world. Media deform our perception of the world, like a lens. The procession of different media create different ruling narratives for each age. What happens, then, when a media is theoretically available but in practice unavailable to over a billion people? Have these people not had a pretty literal limb amputated?

The characters in The World, led by Tao (the charming Tao Zhao, the provincial pop star of Jia’s Unknown Pleasures) and her boyfriend Taisheng (Taisheng Chen) are constantly consulting their cellphones, riding in tiny cars or staring wistfully at airplanes flying overhead. The cellphone is used as an instrument of paternal control in romantic relationships. One character even considers buying a new Motorola with a GPS chip to keep track of his girlfriend, who keeps switching her phone off. Cellphones are a fifth column in your pocket, constantly betraying your actions either actively (storing your incriminating text messages for someone else to read) or passively (not being on). They’re the informers for the forces arrayed against Freedom.

Forces that also keep strict control over travel. An old friend gets a passport and arranges to travel to Ulan Bator, of all places, and Tao can barely comprehend it. One of the characters is tangentially involved in passport fraud, a crime that surely carries a severe (but unspoken) penalty. Even the Russian guest performers at the amusement park have their passports confiscated by their minder. Russia, now supposedly free, still exerts control over its citizens’ movement, and the only way out is through deceit and prostitution to the wealthy class.

Often, we see Tao riding a slow monorail - always alone or nearly so - a reminder of the other technologies that were supposed to liberate but have ended up merely moving us around in circles. Still, The World is a travel narrative, even if the characters never leave Beijing. There’s a destination you can reach from anywhere…

*and therefore exacerbating the already over-the-top narrative contortions of the contemporary thriller

**though, it seems to me in my non-expert way that ‘Chinese’ is a pretty poor blanket term to describe the different cultural, social and racial types that make up the 1+billion inhabitants of the PRC (not to mention Hong Kong or Taiwan)

The World opens July 1 at Cinema Village in NYC, and throughout the summer in other major cities. Check the Zeitgeist Films website for dates and locations

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.

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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.

It seems oddly retrograde to be talking about “the battle of the sexes” in the post-feminist landscape of 2005, (unless we’re discussing the latest Road Rules/Real World challenge), but fundamentally, the dramatic conflict of the heteronormative relationship is as essential to cinema history as gangsters or vampires and just as gory. Comedy, the screwball comedy, is predicated on a power struggle leading up to, within, or post- marriage. The terrors of married life, as Guy Maddin puts it in the epilogue of Cowards Bend the Knee (review forthcoming), are most explicitly evoked in the comedies of Preston Sturges, where the strong female character of the pre-code comedies has devolved into a capricious force of nature capable of destroying a man’s life at a whim.

The post-feminist evolution of the comedy brought the male/female protagonists to equality - but what an equality! All the rough edges were shorn away, and the conflict resolution of these films had the mates fitting together like sticky, overdetermined puzzle pieces. Recently, especially in your standard TV sitcom, we often see a new paradigm - the ineffectual man-schlub and his bossy (but hot, very hot, wife).

The problem with these reversals and “subversions” of gendered traits is that they’re boring and predictable, and most of the joy of going to a movie is in being surprised. While an explicitly homosocial screwball is theoretically possible, the audience for such a comedy still remains slim, not to mention the other hazards involved. How can a non-sexist, non-boring power dynamic (for power in a relationship is always dynamic. No two partners are equally successful, equally talented, equally good-looking - unless they’re Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) be created in a relationship comedy?

2003’s Secretary hinted at the answer: Turn the implicit power relationship explicit, whether in an S&M context, or with the husband and wife trying to blow each other up with bombs, shooting each other with guns, or literally kicking each other while they’re down. Moreso than the overrated Sin City was a “hyper-noir,” Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a “hyper-screwball,” and it doesn’t make a lick of sense. This tale of married paid killers ends in a re-marriage - an orgy of gunfire and faceless corpses. How does this restore balance to the male/female relationship? Well, it doesn’t. It establishes an equilibrium of Asshole and Douche in a relationship with the World - the profane universe outside the sacred marriage - as Hammett.

Director Doug Liman was responsible for 1996’s Swingers, perhaps the clearest example of Asshole/Douche confusion in recent cinema history. The lead character in that film, who I will call Jon Favreau, acts like he is a Douche - trying to maximize his douche behavior for personal success. However, this strategy clearly does not work out for him. It is only when he realizes that he is fact an Asshole and acts according that he gains power (ie, women). The key to knowing which role one plays in a relation is to figure out what you want:

What does Asshole want?
The Asshole wants her way. She cares about how getting her way or not getting her way makes her feel.

What does Douche want?
The Douche wants his partner to feel how he feels. When the partner doesn’t feel the same way, the douche is hurt. The Douche’s primary concern is how the other person is making him feel (about himself).

As my gendered pronouns indicate, in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the male characters is the Douche, the female, the Asshole. Brad Pitt’s douche is constantly setting up needy “trust tests” for Mrs. Smith to take (ie, not kill him). He is passive-aggressively giving up power (the power of life and death) in order to find out how his partner really feels about him. So he puts himself in a booby trapped elevator, lays down his gun, asks the Asshole to tango. Asshole Angelina Jolie, who is explicitly a “dom” in one scene, totally edits out any information that Pitt’s character might have a different opinion than hers. She is completely focused on her self and her work.

It is only in the heat of combat (and sex) that the Asshole and Douche are able to lay aside their conflict and “switch” a bit. The part in the movie that got the biggest laughs was when Pitt repeatedly booted a fallen Jolie (though she was behind an overturned sofa) in a sissy-esque manner. At the end of the film, after the carnage, we’re treated to a scene where Pitt brags about how much sex he’s gotten recently.

Obviously, a world in which people act as Assholes or Douches is a nihilistic one. There’s no outside referent to the rectitude of behavior. The fact that the characters occupations are Assassins is telling. At one point, they reveal to each other that they never lose sleep over killing someone. In earlier Assassin comedies, for example, Grosse Point Blank, the Assassin at least has some bad feelings about what he does, though the wholesale slaughter is still played for laughs. Here, the film goes all the way, taking the “Us against the world” theme of marriage comedies and turning the outside world into literal nobodies, who can be killed with no consequences whatsover. However, at some point, the killing has to end. Am I right? At that point, this relationship is going to be in deep trouble.

What’s clear is that in order for this relationship to thrive, there must be a Hammett involved, and I’m not talking about the therapist (all Hammetts, incidentally). May I suggest Mr. and Mrs. and Junior Smith?

Mr. and Mrs. Smith has joined the Summer Movie Comparison Chart. It’s playing everywhere.

As new as I am to discussing cinema in a serious fashion (if I can even manage that), I have even more difficulty discussing photography. Simply put, I don’t know what makes a given photo a “masterpiece.” I can find hundreds of photos clever in composition and subject, but i don’t think i’ve ever seen a photograph that’s as inexhaustible as a painting (or a film, or a novel). There’s something static and fixed about photographic meaning (to me), some limits of art that photography cannot break through, no matter how abstract or conceptual. When looking at photographic images, I’m some sort of formalist at heart; narrative work doesn’t really excite me. The works of, say, a fabulist like Gregory Crewdson don’t create any “negative space” (in the Manny Farber use of the term) in my mind. They’re just cluttered and posed and I really don’t care about the world the photographer is trying to create (while the same tactics highly interest me in film.) I’m more interested in the way pictorial space in a photo is divided, whether it’s through framing or depth of field.

Lee Friedlander’s work looks accidental. The early work on display is full of shadows, reflections and other artifacts a “professional” photographer would avoid. We can tell by his early commercial work (mostly portraits of Jazz artists) that Friedlander is more than technically competent, so why the obstructed shots, why the occluding shadows?

I think it’s a sort of whimsical formalism, a way to divide space without heavy vertical and horizontal lines. A truck’s rearview mirror turns a flat, midwestern landscape into a strange, almost cubist triptych. The reverse side of a “Yield” sign is a Suprematist triangle dominating the landscape, with a long shadowy brother subverting the artiness. An old couple stands in front of an International style building, looking and pointing at Mount Rushmore, which we can see reflected in the large, square windows of the building behind them.

Most of Friedlander’s work was made with a 35mm Leica, until in the 80s[tk] he acquired a medium format Hassellblad with a wide-angle lens. The clarity and depth of his pictures immediately improved, but he continued to tackle some of the same subjects, almost to the point of duplicating subject matter he had photographed with a normal depth of focus in this new, wide-angle realm. It’s like the formalism of his early work suddenly sprang into 3D life.

Friedlander’s work was a welcome respite from the Big Germanism that dominates contemporary photography. His photos show that one can be clever, and conceptual without making a one’s cleverness the subject of the work.

“Friedlander” is at MoMA in New York until August 29.

Often, when you’ve been a fan of an artist for a long time, their new albums fail to excite and buying them or seeing the artist in concert becomes more of a duty than a joy. Many times, you’ll go to a show resigned to the fact that you’re going to hear mostly songs from the latest record rather than well-loved favorites. I’ve been a fan of Stephen Malkmus since his days with Pavement, and I’ve never been as excited to hear his recent work live as I was with his newest CD, Face the Truth. More playful that his previous two solo efforts, Face the Truth finds Malkmus spreading out, indulging some of his silliest tendencies as well as his guitar virtuosity.

Last night’s show was the loosest I’ve ever seen Malkmus. Usually, he tends to get disinterested in a song he’s playing if he thinks he screws up, and that only happened once during the show last night, during “Freeze the Saints.” His concentration seemed intent throughout the rest of the evening, except for perhaps a meandering middle section to “No More Shoes.” Highlights of the set included album opener “Pencil Rot,” which was fierce with a full band sound, “Water and a Seat” from his last album Pig Lib, and everyone’s favorite, Jenny and the Ess-Dog. It seemed to me to be a pretty short set, even though Malkmus played two new, unreleased songs.

The evening was marred only when he let his drummer take guitar and the mic for the last song of the encore, a bar-band sounding number that devolved into noisy numbskullery lacking none of the artisty and wit of the masters of noise, like Sonic Youth, or openers PAIK, who I want to mention for a minute.

PAIK, or as I like to call them, Frodo Pond, played an opening set of incredibly loud and repitious psychedelic sludge instrumentals. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff, and it was exactly what I needed to clear out the cobwebs of depression that had been clouding my mind since that morning. The best psychedelic live shows (for instance, Spiritualized), transcend time through volume, repetition and lights shows. The earsplitting volume and blinding lights of PAIK’s peak robbed me of my senses, and I was forced to stand eyes closed and fingers in ears, light still flashing across my retinas and sound still filling up my ears and shaking my pants (and my beer). It was an invigorating and exhausting experience. There’s something about the combination of distortion, feedback and repitition that I really think has some sort of a physiological affect on me - ever since I was a teen (prior to any sort of drug experiences), that kind of sound made my brain feel whole and smooth and round. I don’t know if I’m describing the feeling right, but it really is some sort of transcedence. Thank you PAIK!

Stephen Malkmus will play Battery Park in a free(?) show with Yo La Tengo and Laura Cantrell on July 4

As well as being an excuse for routinely showing Barbara Stanwyck in her underwear, William Wellman’s Night Nurse is a comedy about ethics. It’s not for nothing that we’re shown Stanwyck’s probationary nurse Lora Hart proudly take her nurse’s oath, various doctor’s declaim about their obligations to patients and other doctors, and even bootleggers talk about what is or isn’t ethically acceptable to them. The conflict in the story is between professional obligation and personal morality, and it’s ironic that the only character in which these spheres overlap completely is the bootlegger, a swell sociopath on the model of Cagney’s gangster in Wellman’s The Public Enemy of the same year.

From taking a punch from Clark Gable to giving a child a milk bath (with stolen milk supplied by her gangster pal), Stanwyck brings her tough girl style to the role, though it’s a shame there’s not as much soft-focus heat as in, say, Baby Face. The picture is filled with vivid supporting characters, from the throat-clearing head nurse, to the pyschotic doctor with the twitchy eye, and Nick, the chauffeur, Gable in jodhpurs.

Fans of Stanwyck and pre-code comedy should definitely see this if it’s playing in repertory near you. I saw it at MoMA this weekend in a restored print. Incidentally, a MoMA membership is the best $75 value in New York City. It entitles you to a year of free admission to the museum, as well as free admission to all screenings, as well as reduced admission for guests.

Another guest update to The Summer Movie Comparison Chart, this time featuring the animated animalfest Madagascar, contributed by the estimable P. Munt. One of these days I’ll do some work myself….