Author name: Blake Williams

This second time seeing Silent Light was a lot more relaxing than the first. The bath in the lake is somehow hypnotically perfect. I always thought that scenes involving bathing or washing had a strange lulling effect that comforts me to the point of nearly falling asleep. I’m not sure what it is. The same happens for me in the disgusting dirty bath scene near the end of Gummo, the lone good thing in that movie. Shampooing hair just does it for me, I guess.

But the bathing scene here is only one of many entrancing moments in this impossibly huge artistic improvement over Reygadas’ slimy, pretentious Battle in Heaven. Not that Silent Light doesn’t have its pretentious moments. I can think of several, actually; the out-of-focus track into a pink flower being the most ‘huh?’ Most of the tracks I felt an awareness of the aspect ratio that I thought was something new. Reygadas often tracks the camera, with its very wide 2.35:1 ratio, into narrow doorways, making me feel as if I am squishing into the space.

I also appreciated his use of clocks more this time. Stopping the clock in the kitchen at the beginning of the film, beeping wristwatch at the news of a character’s death, starting a clock at the moment of SPOILER resurrection END SPOILER. The film has a huge interest in time, daylight, and maybe even vampirism, and I admit that I still haven’t put it all together, but it is still a great thing to see, and a great example of magical realism in contemporary cinema.

One of the worst films that I have ever seen by an ‘important’ filmmaker, Mouchette seems to be daring me to hate it more than I should. Horrible acting, editing, effects work, and direction across the board, there is only one scene that is worth anything in this graciously short (81 min.) exploration of misanthropy.

The scene takes place at a carnival in which Mouchette is playing in the bumper cars. She and everyone else ram each other, aimlessly steering their vehicles backwards and forwards, and she makes contact with a boy’s car, and the two exchange flirtatious glances and then continue to circle each other around the rink taking turns bumping each other’s cars. Sometimes, the bumping gets quite violent and I am surprised that the actors didn’t suffer from whiplash. The harder they start to ram each of their cars together, though, the more flirtatious Mouchette and this boy become. I always thought that bumper cars were a great tool for seducing someone. I remember that I would always target only my best friends, or would usually go most after the person I had the hots for. When Mouchette and the boy get out of the bumper cars, they become very bashful toward one another, and can barely muster enough courage to approach the other. This reminds me of the peacocks that live on my street that I grew up on in Houston, who will run away from a human who walks toward them on foot, but will walk right up to someone who is sticking his head and arms out of a moving, giant automobile. Or how pedestrians in a city will flick off rude drivers but never do anything if an offensive person is standing right in front of them.

I love A Man Escaped, but after this and Au Hasard, Balthazar, I am starting to question if Bresson is for me. Like I mentioned in the paragraph I posted after I watched Au Hasard, Balthazar, I do not understand the theory that Bresson is making spiritual films. He made a film that shows a girl (who cannot even be considered a saint, she is kind of a brat) tormented for no reason by sane adults in the community, while her mother is dying and her father drunkenly stumbles around. There is never any reason for anyone to treat her this way, I am just supposed to accept that life is tough for some people; they draw the short straw, and are treated cruelly for no reason at all. No wonder Mouchette drowned herself (the looping water also makes for one of the worst editing distractions that I’ve ever seen in the final shot of a film).

So far I have seen embarrassingly few of Werner Herzog’s films, all of them documentaries: Grizzly Man, Lessons of Darkness, and now Encounters and the End of the World. I own both of Anchor Bay’s box sets, so I really don’t have any excuses. January is going to be my Herzog month, where I hope I’ll see everything I own by him. As I’ve come to understand with just these three docs, Herzog loves insanity. He also seems pretty pessimistic about humans, hypothesizing that it is in our nature to self-destruct.

This film works as a series of mini portraits of a range of individuals who have spent a significant amount of time living and working near our planet’s south pole. While one presumes that these studies will provide insight into the effects of isolation, consistently freezing temperatures, and inconsistent day and night cycles, the film instead focuses on more random quirks of the continent’s inhabitants, such as the man who has equal-length pinky and index fingers on both of his hands because of his Native American heritage, or the underwater diver who likes to show his crew cult science fiction films. The more interesting parts are when the subjects speak about their jobs, or upcoming retirement. The film will probably be most remembered for the ‘deranged’ penguin that Herzog deems insane as it marches toward a distant mountain range, mostly likely to its death. The concept of insanity occurring in the animal world is an interesting one even though I doubt it is a new idea. He also questions the idea of homosexuality in the penguin world, which is fun to ponder but again nothing new.

The film’s most beautiful moment involves the sounds that seals make under water. It sounds almost completely unnatural and synthetic, and should inspire electronic composers to capture some recordings of their calls to sample in their compositions.

The entire experience of watching Encounters at the End of the World is enjoyable, but without a clear focus it misses having a lasting impact on me, and settles for being minor, but still good.

When I first saw this film a few years ago, it was one of the most surprisingly enjoyable films that I had expected to be not very good that I’d seen in a long time. Knowing that it was coming from Billy-bob Thornton (almost completely, as he directed it, and wrote it, and is the unrecognizable star of it), I had low expectations since I associated him with Armageddon and Angelina Jolie. Watching it now I was very happy that it mostly holds up. My only issue with it is the music, which is occasionally stunning (the opening track, the track played that leads up to the film’s climax), but mostly just sounds like adult contemporary folk jams.

Sling Blade is more contemplative than I remember, using very long shots that often don’t have much going on, like the protagonist Karl wanders from the foreground to the back and then returns to the foreground, or two characters have a five-minute conversation and the camera is fixed on them without moving. Things that I never would expect from Mister Billy-Bob.

I hadn’t noticed this before, but this film comes down to being a very interesting look at the differences between good and evil. Karl is initially locked away in a mental institution for about 25 years for killing his mother and her lover because he thought that she was being raped. He killed the ‘suspect,’ and in a fit of rage, killed his mother for screaming at him for killing the lover. Obviously, what Karl ended up doing is bad, even though he had good intentions of saving his mother from a rapist. He interpreted a situation of love or lust as evil, and did what he thought was right. Now, he vows that nobody should kill anyone, but eventually ends up killing, once again, something that he views as evil. This time it is not an instinctive reaction, but is a long premeditated build to violence that he has thought out to the best of his ability and deems as the only solution in order for someone else that he loves, a boy named Frank that he befriends throughout the movie, to end up with a decent life. The film cannot be viewed as only a film about how one can sense what is good and what is evil, as it shows something more complex.

Billy-Bob and Dwight Yoakam, who plays Doyle, the film’s villain (and one of the scariest villains that I’ve seen in film) are spectacular in this. John Ritter is hilarious as the sensitive gay friend Vaughn who self-righteously sees the beauty in all people (and may or may not be psychic). The rest of the cast ranges from not very good to okay, but they don’t manage to bring anything else down because there is too much good that offsets the bad.

This is a dynamic list, so it’ll be updated each time I see a film which had its world premiere in 2006 that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

Despite the fact that this is one of the best films ever made, despite the fact that I laugh more consistently throughout this film than any other that I have seen, despite the fact that it has the densest mise-en-scene I am ever likely to see, despite the fact that seeing it in a theatre, like Mon Oncle, feels like a scene straight from the film itself, despite the fact that dozens of scenes within the film are so close to being any number of video art pieces that I have wanted to make at some point in the last few years, and despite the fact that the score is one of the best scores ever made, always as alive and rambling as the film is, I still can’t say that I enjoyed watching this in a theatre for the first time last night.

If you are going to screen a film, especially this one, in a theatre, and you are going to show it projected digitally from a Standard definition DVD, I think you owe it to your audience to let them know beforehand in the advertisement. I would not have gone to this screening if I knew it was going to be projected from a DVD. I own the same Criterion DVD that they projected last night. I can watch it in my house, on an appropriately sized screen so that all of the artifacts, edge enhancement halos, and pixelations aren’t visible. But when you show a DVD on a full-sized movie theatre screen, you are asking for so much trouble. DVD has exactly 6 times worse resolution than Blu-ray, which has roughly 4 times worse resolution than a 35mm film. So they showed something last night that was 1/24 of the resolution that I was expecting to see in the worst case scenario. But then when I factor in that the film was shot in 70mm, 4 times the resolution of 35mm, and I know that what I saw was 96 times worse than the original intended resolution, I can’t help but get a little bit angry.

I own the poster pictured above.

If this is the least accomplished film of Tarkovsky’s career, which is some kind of consensus, I can’t wait to see the rest of his films that i haven’t seen yet, because I thought this was pretty great, especially as a debut. It is definitely minor, lacking the ideas and spirituality (Au Hasard Balthazar???) that Stalker and Solaris are defined by. As a DVD presentation at least, this is the best-looking thing I have seen by Tarkovsky. “Lush” kept repeating in my head on a loop. The photography was almost pristine to the point of being distracting.

This disappointed me a lot since I thought A Man Escaped was really great. The film comes down to finding the parallels between Marie’s life and Balthazar’s. I think the acting is inexcusably bad across board, and the ‘spirituality’ that most critics speak of completely went by me. The film is well shot, but I think that’s the only compliment I can give it. Given that this film has such a massive following I will probably watch it again in the next few months to see if I was affected by a mood or something, so I’m keeping this one short for now.

That movie poster to the right is not the poster for The Poseidon Adventure. It is somehow the poster for Russian Ark, which is funny, because I don’t remember a giant tidal wave of fire and blood washing everyone away. This film solidified yesterday’s theme as “what happens to you just right after you die.” The prediction that Sokurov makes is definitely more beautiful and creative than Kore-eda’s dire outlook on filmmaking and VHS loops, but the two naturally have a lot in common. Basically, there is a tendency for us to believe that we will wade through our respective histories for a while when we die, and then we will dive into the whitewash of eternity.

The fact that this was done in one continuous shot is definitely impressive, and it served a very important purpose that I didn’t expect, in that when i think back to the film and pinpoint who the protagonist is, I identify it as me. It was me walking through the endless halls and looking at the paintings and asking the questions. I also don’t identify what I saw as a document of reality, it was definitely a dream that I had. Probably more accurately than any other film that has attempted it, this film conveyed the experience of dreaming, even if what took place in the film wasn’t supposed to be a dream. If Sokurov ever needs to make a film one day that calls for an authentic-feeling dream state, he has his method.

I feel confident that I would have benefitted from a broader knowledge of Russian history. I don’t think that that is something which should have been avoided, though. I get the impression that Sokurov made the best film that he could have made given his intensions. Nothing can be improved. The film would not have been better if it dumbed itself down for those unknowledgeable about Russian history. It is more impressive and effective in retrospect for me, though, because of this failure of mine to comprehend what the characters were often referencing, which led to an often boring viewing experience for me. But I can’t say I didn’t expect this, nor that I didn’t enjoy the film more than I expected to.

This film had so much potential. The first 45 minutes were completely devastating for me. Roughly 20 newly dead Japanese citizens show up at a kind of commune with a school-like headquarter where they will decide one specific memory from their life to be made into a film that they can bring with them into eternity where their memories will be erased, leaving only the memory that they each now have on film as their only mementos from their time on Earth. And….exhale. Watching the interviews, which have a documentary quality to them, where the dead people shuffle through meaningful memories, trying to pick the one that matters most to them is massively poignant. Of course, viewers of this film will simultaneously shuffle through their own memories, which ones are the most important. Good and bad memories from my life swarmed back to me during this film, and I was reminded that when I do actually die, I won’t have the option of taking one of them with me; they will all just disappear completely.

And it’s not like taking one memory would be much better, anyway. I struggled to decide if this film saw this situation as heaven or hell. To be sitting for eternity with one specific memory on a loop sounds pretty hellish to me. I was reminded of a nightmare that I had only a few days ago, in which I was killed (this was a long and complicated process, but not important to this paragraph), and was immediately ushered into a room, about 15 x 15 ft., all black walls about 10 feet high, concrete floor, one light in the middle of the ceiling, maybe 15 watts, not too bright, no furniture, no doors. And that was it, I was to stay in this room for the rest of eternity. Made me think of the last episode of Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper is still in the black lodge, to this day, I believe.

The film loses its footing halfway through, though, and begins a soap opera in which two staff members (also dead) who work at the commune and interview the dead begin a sort of love triangle with one of the dead. Not in a sex way, but in way that is too convoluted to detail, but basically they fight for each others’ memories. Not to mention that the dead man in this triangle (which actually might be a square) is allowed to have access to 70 VHS tapes, each one has footage from each year of his life, to help him decide which memory to have made into a film. But if there is already actual footage of the people’s lives, why the need to remake these memories into films? Can’t they just pick one of the VHS tapes to bring with them? Bad move, introducing this.

All in all, good idea for a film, but it gets too melodramatic and unnecessarily complex towards the end.