Author name: Blake Williams

I never got to see this in a theatre, which is clearly ideal, but watching it on Blu-ray, with a proper set-up, is probably a pretty close second. Anyone who has heard of this film already knows how stunning it looks, even if they haven’t seen it. The more interesting thing that I was thinking about while watching this, was trying to determine what it was about it that separated it from a standard Discovery Channel special (nothing against the Planet Earth series, which I’ve seen one episode of and enjoyed). Nature channels air similar programs with similar photography with similar themes, and then one must note that director Ron Fricke is also the photographer behind Koyaanisqatsi, Chronos, and other similarly styled films (none of which I have seen) that came before Baraka, and I anticipated an even bigger challenge in watching this and trying to find something original about it.

And my answer to that is that it just feels more monumental than anything else like it that I’ve seen. I often wondered during the film how I would ever be impressed by the visuals in any other film ever again, and decided that I should give it some time, don’t watch any films in the next few weeks where the cinematography plays too much of a role, and just maybe I can see something again one day that wows me the way this film did. I liked Baraka more than I think I should like a film whose raison d’etre seems to be how good it looks. Yes, it has its messages about civilizations and human nature that are the staples of all of these wordless-with-brilliant-photography films, and those messages were interesting and often very moving. There was even a solar eclipse.

As I expected it to from the moment the film started, Baraka first focuses on the more tribal and “natural” civilizations and then progresses to the city life, and predictably portrays the city as corrupt, noisy, structured, and ultimately inhumane. But the city sequences were the most beautiful to me. The stacked houses, crammed skyscrapers, rhythmic traffic, and sounds of machinery are stunning, and I am grateful for it all. The little yellow chickees got a raw deal, but my heart was most involved with the city, and I feel like I should say “thank you” to Baraka for reminding me of why I love my throbbing city so much.

Happy Together is right behind Tropical Malady as the two best cinematic representations of homosexuality that I have seen. Everything else doesn’t even come close, except, maybe, for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. What separates these two for me, is the way that the gay characters are treated with the same respect that straight characters are given, both by the filmmaker and the other characters in the film. Neither film features a single character who opposes homosexuality, or views it as bazaar. Granted, Happy Together has few characters other than the two leads, but the characters do often show affection in not-so-private locations. It is easy to make a film about what is wrong with the way the world views gay people; it will be touching, and important, and ignite heated conversation. But what is not easy to do, with either a gay or straight love story, is to make the viewer care about the characters’ emotions and simultaneously forget that the two lovers are minorities. The result is a film that is neither topical, nor didactic, nor schmaltzy. This is, I believe, what every “queer” film should aspire to be.

I’m always impressed with how abstract this film is given the time period in which it was made, but am at the same time put off by many of its more “artistic” moments for feeling gimmicky. There are things, like a couple of frames of an erect penis, a quick shot of a vagina, gouging out the eyes of a sheep (a clear homage to Un Chien Andalou), little animations, and a creeping tarantula, that all feel unimportant, like they are there for shock value, or to give the film some sort of edge that I don’t think it needs. I see these things so much in “art film” and video art now, perhaps they became cliches because of this film? I do like the editing of the film breaking and the pseudo splicing it back together, though. And anything involving the young boy caressing the image of the woman/women and the split screens are all very effective.

For the story, it’s difficult not to think of David Lynch’s recent output when watching this. Actress in crisis? Check. Two women confusing themselves for each other? Check. Sense of lesbian longing? Check. I’m actually really surprised that Lynch never mentions Persona when he mentions his favorite films. In general though, I thought that the story begins well but becomes a little too convoluted and also laughably melodramatic in some cases in its latter half. A story about how a woman abandoning her son and being repulsed by him made me feel like the film was going in a direction that i didn’t really care for, and then Bergman went ahead and showed the scene again all the way through. I get what that means conceptually in the film, but it was pretty frustrating having to watch a scene that I didn’t really care for twice. Made me think of Syndromes and a Century, a film in which I have much more interest in its dualities and halving.

Persona is beautiful though, and undeniably influential and groundbreaking. I just wish that I enjoyed it this time as much as I did the first time.

This is my first Tati experience in a theatre, and more than most films that I have seen both on DVD and in a theatre, Mon Oncle proves to be designed to be seen in the highest resolution possible and with a large audience. There are details that I never even came close to noticing either time I saw it on DVD, and the laugh track of the audience becomes a Tati-esque element unto itself. In the same way that I am so aware of the fact that I am watching a film in a theatre when I watch a David Lynch film, watching this film I was well aware of the fact that I was in a dark room filled with complete strangers laughing at a wall. Tati dissects the humor in his film over and over again in a way that I have not seen in any other comedy, first showing a joke, then later showing a character learning from the joke, itself becoming a joke, and then other characters reacting to that character’s joke. It’s easy to say that I am overanalyzing Tati’s sense of humor. He is just a guy who shows his sense of humor on screen in a very simple way. It’s not that I think that Tati mulled over the humor in his films so meticulously that it ended up being so perfect, but I think that he was able to take what had been seen as funny in film and made a joke out of that, which gives his humor such a feeling of layering upon layer. Mon Oncle is my second favorite Tati film, still worlds behind his epic Playtime, my holy grail of films to see in a theatre.

I do have to note that I was not happy that the Cinematheque Ontario showed this film with an English dub, instead of in French with subtitles. Many scenes that I usually think are funny were hurt by the dubbing, and it makes me wary of seeing Playtime in a theatre, thinking that they might show it with the awful “international” audio track.

This was as good as I was hoping it would be on a first viewing. I definitely enjoyed watching it more than I did Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, but I do prefer, at least right now, his Ordet.

The first half of the film was pretty much perfect. The set up is genuinely creepy; the look of everything, along with its narrow aspect ratio and significant film damage, is beautiful. The shadow chase is a spectacular use of the medium of the moving image, and extremely impressive for its time period. The film began to lose momentum about halfway. It never becomes boring, but I caught my attention wandering off a few times near the end. Many people attribute this to the frequent appearance of text, as the protagonist reads a book on vampires to learn about what they are, but when these passages showed up on the screen, they were actually what regained my attention. My only issue with the text was that is often stayed on the screen for too long. I was able to read it almost 3 times through before the text was removed from the screen. No biggie.

I love that there isn’t really a monster in this film; no creature with fangs, or blood-sucking, or flying. The film limits itself to the more spiritual ideas of a vampire, like eternal damnation and avoidance of the afterlife. I look forward to the next time I see, because I am sure that I will like it even more.

The trend of watching films that I really enjoyed a few years ago and now thinking they are actually not very good at all continues with Requiem For A Dream. American Beauty, Donnie Darko, and Dancer in the Dark: none of them are doing it for me these days. I decided that for Requiem, it is because the film seems to be aimed at a younger, MTV minded audience. Which makes sense, and is probably a good thing, given its message is a capslocked “DON’T DO DRUGS.” And this is a good thing to get ingrained into the heads of a young audience, because, clearly, they shouldn’t do drugs. But I wonder, the entire time that I am watching this film, why a filmmaker in his late twenties or early thirties would want to make a film like this after he made such an interesting film about religion and mathematics in Pi. There are those who argue that Requiem is not just about drugs, but about the entire idea of addiction. But I think that is difficult to argue, given that all four of the characters’ downfall is some form of substance abuse.

A very interesting film could have been made by Aronofsky, with these characters, and maybe even based on this book. If we were shown the motivations for the younger characters to be drug dealers, and were given a more plausible, original path in which the characters end up in tragedy, then I could see myself being moved by the film. The only character who comes close to this is Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb. I see that she loves watching television with her lone living room chair stationed directly in front of the television, I can understand her reaction to being notified that she has won a slot on her favorite TV show, I can understand that she wants to be thinner so that she can once again impress people and maybe even find a new man to replace the deceased husband that she so deeply misses. Her methods at attaining all of this are stupid, but believable, and in the end pretty heartbreaking. The younger characters, though, I have no sympathy for. You shoot up in that arm, in that spot again? Of course you deserve to lose your arm. You sell your body for a little bit of coke? Of course you deserve to look like a whore and get fucked in a massive anal orgy. Aronofsky has made one good film to date, The Wrestler, fortunately his more recent one, showing that maybe he is actually learning something from these didactic and unsubtle early films.

This is a strange and compelling film about – I’m not very sure what. What I do know is that Taiwan is experiencing a massive drought, watermelons have become portals into a woman’s vagina, and there is a lot of sex. A woman named Shiang-chyi is attracted to an old friend named Hsiao-Kang(or maybe he’s an ex? or a complete stranger?) who happens to be an actor in pornographic films. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hsiao-Kang’s porno scenes were figments of Shiang-chyi’s imagination. Oh, and there are also 4 or 5 musical numbers spread throughout the film, some where characters are now dragons, or penises, or lost in a field of watermelon umbrellas.
Not to mention a couple of ant attacks. This is a very surreal film that is mostly very entertaining, but I didn’t feel anything for any of the characters, and I wasn’t completely wowed by the intentionally campy showstopper songs. I did laugh quite a bit, and found the whole film to be pretty well paced. This is the first film that I have seen by Tsai, who is supposedly one of the true masters of contemplative cinema working today, so hopefully some of his other films carry a little more weight.

To say that Sleepaway Camp is one of the best horror films ever made is not giving it enough credit. This would, without question, land in a Top 10 Films of the 1980’s list that I would create. In creating a film about adolescence and transsexuality, Robert Hiltzik perfectly realized this film to have its climax be both shocking and explicable. What is misinterpretted as campiness and quirks and 1980-isms proves to be a subtle build-up to what should have been obvious all along. In showing us just how obvious everything is, it becomes questionable. In Todd Haynes’ Safe, Julianna Moore plays a woman who is physically reacting to something, but we don’t know what. The film makes a judgement of what it could be, and halfway through, decides to follow this diagnosis. While it is the most logical conclusion to follow, the fact that it is being followed so closely and matter-of-factly makes the viewer question whether or not the filmmaker is just leading us further and further into a rabbit hole.

When the killer in Sleepaway Camp is revealed, it is one of the most expertly crafted scenes I have ever seen. The triumphant trumpets, the zooms in and out of the killer, the computer distortion, and the hybrid of human and animal wheezing came together to create the only cinematic sensation that has prompted me to physically back away from the screen, while at the same time try to look closer to understand just what exactly it is that I saw. This movie is perfect.

This is my third Jia Zhang-ke film, and probably my favorite. The characters have a perfect level of melancholy throughout the film to be believable without ever even approaching melodrama. The film follows two characters. A male character searches for his daughter and the mother of his daughter whom he hasn’t seen in 16 years, and a nurse who is searching for her husband, whom she has not seen in 2 years. To make matter worse (and to give this film its plot), the town that both of them are searching in has recently been submerged under water. Jia ‘s usual themes of modernization, nostalgia, and artificiality are present, with occasional, jarring moments of otherworldy sci-fi. The views of the newer buildings in Still Life evoke Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. This is a very relaxing film, I saw it on a flight, and it eased, or numbed, my fears of my plane crashing. The cinematography is among the more beautiful that I have seen this year, and I prefer it to the lensing in 24 City and The World.

The experience of watching this film was actually somewhat painful. The film follows three naive women who are some of the more annoying female protagonists of any film that I have seen. They are giggly, bitchy, superficial, and completely delusional. But, the film has a pretty stellar finale that mostly makes up for almost the entire film that preceded it.

The film has many of the features of the French New Wave, a movement that never really interested me. The film is all shot on location around Paris.

Along with the aforementioned issues I have with the women, the men are almost just as bad. The men flirt with any woman they see, feel them up, harass them in swimming pools, and even bang their heads on tables in restaurants. I despised everyone in this film, which I learned was the point. What happens when young, attractive women are so naive and careless? What happens when men get their way over and over again with the relentlessly submissive women? The last scene of Les Bonnes Femmes happens; and for me, it felt so very good to watch.