Author name: Blake Williams

The aftermath of this film has been astonishing for me. When it first ended, I thought it was a good film that was well shot, but overlong by over half an hour. Over the last day, my perception of its quality has grown massively. Maybe it is that it is so minimal that it is impossible to not recollect on its gaps and repetitions for clues. Maybe it is the fact that so many people walked out, which usually is a good sign.

Films that I have been to that have had the largest percentage of its audience walk out, in no particular order:

and now Colossal Youth. Granted, all of these except Punch-Drunk Love were in film festivals, where the viewer is trying to cram in as many films per day as possible, and is more likely to give up early on in a film for the sake of cutting his losses. All of these films are exceptional (La Frontiere de L’aube may not be, but most of the walkouts for that took place before the film went off the rails).

So, Colossal Youth. It is difficult to think of a starting point in discussing this, as it is such an elliptical film. There are two huge points that stand out to me: The photography and the doors (lots of doors). Before any of this, though, it seems important that I note that this is my first Pedro Costa film. I understand that his last few films have been sisters to Colossal Youth, introducing characters that play a role in it (especially In Vanda’s Room, the character in which this entire trilogy is named for), and so I look forward to visiting those films and then revisiting this one.

The photography, despite being done in standard definition MiniDV, is brilliant. Consistently evoking Baroque paintings, Costa manages brightness and darkness with video in a way that I have never seen before. Shown in the poster that I put at the top of this entry, the bright sky of the day is rendered black behind blaring white buildings. In the murky grey sheds that many of the characters call home, holes in the ceiling, which have every right to be viewed as unfortunate and problematic because of their allowance for rain to enter into the house, are only portrayed as openings for light to come into the darkness that consumes the space. The middle-aged cast are all the “children” of Ventura, with a range of skin color that is as varied as the light and darkness of most of the shots.

The role of a door is just as much the protagonist of the film as Ventura seems to be. One of the first images of the film is of Ventura’s wife throwing much of his furniture out of their second-floor window, notably a large door. A door ominously drifts shut during a conversation, there are secret passages, a door is completely removed instead of opened, characters wait at doors for long stretches of time, talking into the doorway at a character or characters that we cannot see. In a sense, a door feels pointless in this film, as all of the characters seem to know each other, walk in and out of each other’s homes at will, treat each other like family, and most of all the houses are generally in such bad shape that a door does virtually nothing to prevent someone from entering through any number of crevices, cracks, or holes in the walls and roofs.

The acting is also pretty, even without the knowledge that all of the actors are non-actors who the director found and basically asked to reenact their actual lives in front of the camera (kind of makes this another in the huge trend of semi-documentaries that are showing up). More to come once I see more of Costa’s work.

I’d forgotten how effective this movie is since I fell in love with it when it first came out in theatres. First of all, it is very funny. It takes me a minute to get into Bill Murray’s dead-pan mode that he has recently been typecast into, and the set-up of the plot requires a generous suspension of disbelief. But once Don Johnston hits the road, the movie really seems to glide.

The ending of the film is pretty brutal. I remembered a conversation in a restaurant from a few months ago in which a man sitting behind me said to either his friends or family something along the lines of “a human’s existence is basically worthless unless he reproduces.” Regardless of how silly that is, I do think that it is important to feel like you have left something significant behind before you die, a child is an example, but any number of things apply, too: an influential artwork, a breakthrough in mathematics, a useful gadget, etc. are all babies. Most people, though, don’t invent new things or ideas, and a child really is one of the few things that they can be satisfied in having created. In Broken Flowers, Don Johnston is presented with the possibility of having reproduced. He acts nonchalantly about the prospect, but internally becomes infatuated with the idea. As his likelihood of discovering a definitive truth to this possibility fades throughout the course of the film, Johnston is visibly emotionally devastated. When he is left standing in the road at the end, left looking at every Early-twenties male that crosses his path as if he could be his son, it is a heartbreaking conclusion. When I first saw this film in Brookline, MA at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the cut to black at the end elicited two “No!’s” from my audience.

I really enjoyed this as a study on fate, chance, greed, and adultery. At the beginning, the plot reminded me of Bresson’s L’Argent, as I expected the film to follow the earrings from owner to owner as they made their way around the world. However, when the earrings quickly end up not too far from Madame de (?), the film begins to concentrate on all of the lies that each character is telling as they all secretly seek a different life than the one that they are living right now. The comedy and the tragedy of it all, though, is that they think that they are the only ones who want change.

The film is amazingly shot in elaborate tracking shots that circle the interiors, following the actors from behind or off to the side without feeling sneaky.

Towards the end of the film I did feel my interest waning, but it was captured again in the final 20 minutes when things are revealed, and the unfortunate finale plays out. Throughout the film, I found most of the three protagonists to be pretty unlikeable. They are all obsessed with their worth, possessions, and royalty. But two of the characters eventually developed to be more sympathetic, and the film finally declared a villain. The film seemed to end on an anti-religious note.

This film is batshit crazy in every way and completely great. It is extremely difficult to watch at parts, and has no less than 5 different characters that make me want to gag, and no less than 8 scenes that made my testicles recoil. Religious imagery and symbolism of some sort appear in practically every scene in this film, and I actually think that the human body is a more disgusting entity after watching this. But somehow the whole thing is completely compelling, funny, imaginative, and sometimes even a bit enlightening. The music is one of my favorite scores of all time. It mixes great examples of many genres, from jazz to classical to rock n roll, presumably to match the different genres shown in this film, and for all of the personalities in the film.

I think that the religious symbolism could have become tiresome and trite, but the film goes so far overboard with all of it that the ridiculousness of everything feels fresh. I don’t know how someone who enjoys this film could claim to be a member of any religion depicted in this film, and in that sense the film feels like it was only designed for a group of non-believers to sit around and make fun of religion without starting any sort of balanced discussion. The film proclaims religion, or any organization, really, to be just as insane as this film is, and just as fake, too, as shown in the final shot.

This could have been a big influence on Todd Haynes’ really great I’m Not There. But this didn’t click with me. I got the impression that it was trying really hard to be a non-standard biopic, a great goal to have, in a way that just didn’t fit. Where I’m Not There earned its schizophrenia with its hyper-faceted subject, 32 Short Films felt like it was purposefully trying to hide important things about Glenn Gould’s life from me, or maybe it just didn’t know many important parts of his life. Not that the 3 or 4 avant-garde shorts are bad. They were all good ideas. But they felt like time-passers and indulgences to me. The music is great, though, and the opening and closing shots are very good, too, reminding me of the centerpiece of Albert Serra’s Birdsong. Also, Canada is a bilingual country, I get it, but if I’m not watching the film in a theatre in Quebec, and there are characters speaking French, there should be English subtitles. Everyone in Toronto who speaks French also speaks English, and most of the city doesn’t speak any French, I’d bet. Other than that, though, The Royal Cinema is a great place to see a movie.

I wasn’t as impressed with this film as I’d hoped I would be, but I definitely enjoyed it. The music is great, and I really liked the acting. In many ways, this reminded me of the, to my mind, extremely overrated David Gordon Green George Washington. Not just because they are both about lower class blacks and their everyday lives, but the overall tone, pacing, and direction felt similar. I admit that I had trouble understanding the parallels between the plot of the film and the intermittent scenes in the slaughterhouse, which Burnett obviously sees to be of great importance given the title of the film. I also thought the film was very funny. Also reminded me a bit of Gummo, not as repulsive, though.

Hotel Monterey is a structuralist film, ironic given that there is no structure. The film feels like someone wanted to make a 5-minute short about a hotel, went out and shot a full tape of footage, and then decided to include everything in the final product. People in the hotel look into the camera, back away from it, and smile at it. There is no audio, not even ambient noise, so the ambient sounds in my own viewing environment became the soundtrack for the film. People talking about art, going out to lunch, construction workers grinding at the pavement downstairs (I watched this in my studio). There are some great shot in here, some I would love to call my own and use them in my own hotel video. But right now i don’t think I can appreciate something like this.

When Marco and I were in Cannes, I was vehemently against seeing “the classroom movie.” In my mind, all teacher classroom films are the same, and never do anything interesting. Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, Half Nelson, Sister Act II, the list goes on. Also, many of the films that we had already seen in the festival were underwhelming despite interesting premises. Not that I feel bad for skipping this, since I got to see it for free anyway, but I do have to admit that it is much better than I thought it would be, and I think it is the best film to win the Palme D’or since Elephant won it (though if Synecdoche, New York had taken it, it would have been the best Palme D’or winner since Paris, Texas (no joke)).

The film is ultimately about the precariousness of people between the ages of 13 and 15. One gets the sense that one wrong step with any student and it will destruct his entire future. I know that I am an incredibly different person, in every way, from who I was in middle school. And I can remember specific incidences which initiated particular changes in my personality and my outlook on my life. And I sometimes grimace and shudder to think of what I would be like had that particular incident not taken place.

When a struggling student enters into a conflict, and the teacher is in a point blank position to react in a way that will either devastate the student or redeem him, I can absolutely relate to, and be engrossed by, the pressure that is on the teacher at almost all times. Most of Entre les Murs appears to be a fly-on-the-wall account of the goings on of a French middle school French class, but certain plot points disrupt the flow, and toward the end one particular troublemaking student becomes the focus, and a decision has to be made that will either begin his maturation into an adult, or cripple him into a hopelessly bleak prospect, the stakes get so high that it was somewhat difficult to watch.

Other films in the genre attempt all of this, though, so all of this could be just a “so what?” But there are other interesting things going on, formally. The film is acted by Francois Begaudeau, who wrote the book that the film is based on, which is an autobiography about his own teaching experiences. And the students are real, too. It is one of the most striking life imitating art imitating life projects that I have heard of, making all of the drama all the more real and consequential.

Still utterly terrific, despite a minor 3rd Act disintegration, this film is proving to me that it will be a classic for decades. The music still holds up, Origin of Love being one of the best songs to appear in a film ever (maybe the best), the acting is spectacular, the dialogue sharp, and the pace is brisk. The last 1/3 shows signs of falling apart, though. Songs Exquisite Corpse and Midnight Radio hold little interest for me lyrically and musically, and multiple endings move from one to the other in too rushed of a way. But it has never been enough to sink the brilliant first hour. It deals intelligently with one of the most interesting “genres” of sexuality to me: transvestites. The film comes close to treating non-hetero characters as unafflicted by society: mothers, friends, and the general public show no qualms with the men in drag and same-sex marriage, only once or twice breaking that, like when a man shouts “Faggot!” during Angry Inch.