My favorite shot in this film is, for some reason, the shot of the goth at the Le Aviateurs bar, with the light on the left side of her face coming in and out, in the latter third of the film. I found myself looking forward to this shot throughout most of the running time. Close seconds are the moments when El is following the, potentially fake, Sylvia, and a streetcar dives between them, and the sound momentarily swells and throbs of machinery and motion, and then back to reality, as well as the moments of, potentially fake, Sylvia’s reflection on the windows of passing streetcars. Very nice, but I preferred when it was subtle. We see her reflection at few too many times and a bit too clearly after a while. Like in a Haneke film, particularly the ending of Cache, I like the moments in this film where the meat of a shot is so subtle that when you notice it, who get the sense that you could be the only person who noticed it. Film is still lovely, though, and now I can’t wait to dive into my Jose Luis Guerín box set in the coming week.

I see on Guerín’s imdb page that he has a small number of films under his belt since his first film, a drama he made when he was 22 called Los Motivos de Berta. A couple are documentaries, and a couple are fiction. All of them, though, are rarely seen and largely unknown even in Spain. The Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA just had a retrospective on all of his films a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t live in Boston anymore, so I didn’t go. Guerín is also an installation artist; much like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, he blurs his filmmaking practices with his art, creating pieces that build on the ideas in his films. While I’m unsure of which came first, his filmmaking or his installation work, both Guerín and Weerasethakul advantageously crossover between art and film, while Miranda July uses the medium as an advertisement for her work to the ‘indie’ community (I do like Me and You and Everyone We Know, though, despite its commercial indie presentation). While I think that ‘art cinema’ has become just as much a negative term this century as a positive one as a genre, it is refreshing when filmmakers show that they have genuine artist sensibilities. I think that a filmmaker that is interested in how his films function as an exploration of ideas should also be working in more ‘art’ media like sculpture, installations, and video projects; it’s narrow and pompous to think that celluloid is the only medium appropriate for telling stories. Most of the best visual ideas that I have seen so far this year have not been in cinemas or on DVD, but in art museums, and most of my favorite films were made while being simultaneously explored and developed in other media.

That said, In the City of Sylvia advances the practice of filmmaking like few films this decade have. The task of presenting a film that contains something that a viewer has never seen the likes of is difficult enough, but to translate an idea so simple, and seemingly cliche, into something so fresh, blew my mind. The film follows one character nicknamed El, and contains almost no dialogue except for one key scene. I watched the film without subtitles up until this scene and easily understood everything that was going on; it’s pretty much pure cinema. Shots of flowing hair could have gone on for reels for all I cared. Perfectly frames shots of the characters on a streetcar made it seem as if they were gliding through the city. When El is first scouting at the cafe, layers of women fill the frame at different depths, communicating with people off camera, but collaged so that the goal is to understand who it is that El is looking at. The film I thought of most often while watching this was Cache. Shots are generally low and dense with information. At times I couldn’t tell if I was watching what El is seeing or if there was another character that I never saw that was watching the events, too. The film deals with El stalking Elle, and I was always paranoid that some other force was present, but invisible; another viewer; perhaps the being that tagged ‘Laure, Je T’aime’ all over the city. The graffiti turned the city into a hall of mirrors; when I saw one tag, I could tell that I had seen that tag before, but couldn’t remember which specific one I was seeing. Later, when there are flashes of reflections of people who aren’t there, and dialogue is ominously repeated, I was dazzled and felt unbalanced. Some of the awkward supporting characters and shots reminded me of Jacques Tati, another master of making films about composition and repetition.

This is my favorite film by Michael Haneke, though I still haven’t seen anything from before Benny’s Video, including the supposedly similar and arguably better 71 Fragments. Code Unknown is just as rife with didacticism as any of his other work, but it is less offensive and belittling of me as a viewer than anything else I’ve seen by him, especially Benny’s Video or either version of Funny Games. I think this is true because the main element of the film that I focus on is its formal arrangement of the plot rather than the filmmaker showing me how cruel the middle and upper classes are to each other or how much of a failure communication has proven to be. While these are interesting and important topics, Haneke tends to talk down to anyone who happens to view his films. The amazing thing for me in Code Unknown is that there is a constant tension involved with whether I feel like I’m being manipulated to feel guilty, or if I actually feel guilty about what I’m seeing and my reaction to it, or if I can feel justified with who I am naturally sympathizing with.

Like in the brilliant subway scene near the end of the film, as I try to decide if I am a prick for sympathizing with Binoche’s Anne. She is being harrassed on a train by a jerk, simple enough. Oh, but he’s an Arab, would she ignore his questions if he were white and well-dressed? But would someone who is white and well-dressed speak to a stranger in this tone? Would I take her reaction to be more rude than defensive if he was white and well-dressed? Probably not. But I considered these things. Maybe because I knew I was watching a Michael Haneke film and that I know that that is what he wants me to consider. But the film is obviously about class struggles and struggles with language and prejudices, so it’s all in line with the film’s logic.

But, as the title suggests, the film is a code, a puzzle, presented out of order and supposedly orderable. It handles this form much better than Arriaga ever has or, probably, will, because the shuffled plot structure is truly baffling here. Where 21 Grams and the copycat Babel (has there been a more annoying plagiary in filmmaking this decade than this trite re-imagining of Code Unknown?) take simple and cliche narratives, slice them up and rearrange it all to make the viewer have to ‘think,’ Haneke made a puzzle where no matter what order one put the pieces in, at least one piece wouldn’t make sense, while at the same time, every possible ordering of it would have the illusion that it makes complete sense. Which is a pretty apt metaphor for the structure of civilization.

100 of the forum members at theauteurs.com recently combined top 10 films of all time lists to make a ‘definitive’ Top 10 best films of all time list, inspired by Sight & Sound’s decade Top 10s. I participated in this list, so I thought I should post the final results here, in the lists section. A pretty boring list, but two of my choices made the cut:

Well, my first encounter with Chris Marker, the voiceover wunderkind that I’ve always heard so much about and was so excited to dive into, has happened. Now, I’m skeptical enough when it comes to lessons-of-the-world-told-in-pictures films like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi. The practice of setting stock footage and photos to music or voice over rarely eclipses IMAX movie-of-the-week superficiality and didacticism, but at least it always looks nice and is hardly boring. Chris Marker has finally entered my life to let me know that yes, it is possible to make one of these films and have it be mindnumbingly tedious and boring. The film crawled along for me, with no sense of development and no chronology of ideas. I got excited at one point when I got the idea to check my DVD player’s display clock so that I could see how much longer was left, but I was deflated to find that that first hour and a half that I thought I’d already sat through was only the first thirty-three minutes.

I can’t say that I have much to write here because it all went in one ear/eye and out the other. I do remember some Icelandic girls walking in a rural area, and some cats, the fake kind shown on the left side of the poster. I remember that a woman was speaking throughout the film and I found her to be pretentious. My first encounter with My Dinner with Andre when I was in high school came to mind, a similar experience for me. Even a five-minute cameo by Vertigo in the film’s latter half couldn’t hold my attention. I thought ‘ooh, Vertigo’ but it went nowhere and I didn’t know why they were talking about the things they were talking about. I’m just not at Marker’s level, I guess. I’ll give it another shot in 5 years.

The cumulative effect of this movie very much exceeded my expectations after the first 15 minutes. I was pretty worried during the film’s opening that I was in for 100 minutes of teenage angst, artfully filtered and tritely narrated. Fortunately, Alexis Dos Santos appears to be a gifted director, and he creates some very real and sympathetic subjects with character types that are difficult to portray in any kind of fresh way: the ambiguously gay virgin, his seemingly white-trash mother, the dorky girl friend, the absent neglectful father, the straight(er) guy friend, snotty sibling, etc. I didn’t have much of a reason to be optimistic during Lucas’ prologue, where he asks deep questions like “If my parents made love a month before I was conceived, would it be me being born? or another boy?” and “do girls like sucking dick?” He wants to get laid so that he will “stop waking up all sticky.” I thought I was watching a Larry Clark film for a moment, or maybe a Gummo outtake. I’m not sure if Dos Santos actually just made a good film with a weak opening, or if he intentionally structured this like a typical coming-of-age bore in order to make the rest seem so transcendent of the genre. Or, he is critiquing the genre.

Well, perhaps the film didn’t immediately get better after the opening. I didn’t actually appreciate any of the characters until about halfway through. I initially thought the film was focusing on Lucas’ repressed homosexuality, and that Dos Santos was using his friends Nacho and Andrea as the vehicles to express the realization. But, like Lucas’ delusions of successful songwriting and rock-n-rolling, and his parents’ delusions of being able to fix a crumbling family, Lucas just seems like he’s doing what he’s suppose to do, wondering things that he’s supposed to wonder at his age. His experimentation with Nacho is less an example of homosexuality than an exploration that every straight man wants, but represses. Lucas is so likable because he is ballsy and goes after what he wants. I like Dos Santos, too, for ballsiness. Argentinean cinema is getting progressively more exciting with every new filmmaker that I am acquainted with from the country. Considering their Malbec wine, Argentina is beginning to rival Thailand as my number one fantasy destination to have a ‘dinner and a movie’ date.

When I started this project of immediately writing my first reactions to every film that I watch, it was purely for personal use. I wanted to have some kind of a log for the films I was seeing, and I wanted to log these films in a less lazy way than making a list of titles. I love making lists. I have several lists that I’m building right now, including a monster ‘decade’ post that I hope will be ready by Dec. 31. While I keep all of these posts in a text document on my hard drive, it also makes sense to me to post them online on this blog so that I can access my thoughts from anywhere, even if I’m not at my computer; also so that some of my friends can read what I think about the films I am seeing, what I recommend, etc. I’m not a film journalist, and I typically avoid being too analytical about films I see. I’m not very good at deciphering what a filmmaker was going for with each film, nor how successful a film is in the context of film history; I often zone out for large chunks of a film, thus I think it’s pretty common for me to dislike films that are actually quite good. The only research I tend to do between watching a film and collecting my thoughts on this blog involves looking at particular names of cast members on imdb or wikipedia, and reading a few reviews of the films from NY Times, Slant, and Armond. Reading these helps me to remember certain things that I was thinking during the film, so that I can make these entries as thorough as possible. As I said, I write these for personal use, but I’ve noticed that a handful of people that I do not know are reading; the internet can bring some unexpected surprises. So I’ve started putting more ‘effort’ into these things. I panic when I notice I’ve published something with grammar and spelling mistakes, and I’m wary of the pedestrian observations that a rough reading of a film can be composed of.

Anyway, this is the 100th review that I’ve posted on this blog, so I thought I’d offer a belated Mission Statement of sorts to preface my actual thoughts on Céline and Julie Go Boating, Rivette’s ridiculous masterpiece of a film. I had a ticket to see this at the Cinematheque Ontario last December, in a 35mm print, but I missed it because I made plans to visit some friends in Boston. I knew that this was considered one of the great neglected films of the DVD world, so it killed me to miss it. I picked up the BFI disc, a nice set but it has a generally fuzzy image quality. I’m no aficionado of the French New Wave, and this was the first Rivette film that I have seen (I have Va Savoir and Don’t Touch the Axe now, though, and I hope to watch a bootleg of the 13-hour Out 1 by the end of the summer).

The main film that I was thinking of while watching this was INLAND EMPIRE. It’s hard to deny the similarities: women mirroring women, women watching themselves diving into unknown worlds of melodramatic, dangerous fiction as if they are watching a film, the three+ hour length, etc. A big difference, though, is that this film’s transformation came out of nowhere. In Lynch’s film, one can sense from the brooding and bizarre opening 5 minutes that the film will not succumb to any sort of logic. The surprising thing is that it takes almost an entire hour before Laura Dern chases the rabbit into its hole and sends the plot into oblivion. Rivette takes care of that chase right at the outset of Céline and Julie. Julie follows Céline the moment she sees her pass in a park, dropping her belongings along her way. Much like the pursuit at the heart of In the City of Sylvia, an actual confrontation seems to be avoided for the simple fact that it would end the enthralling chase. While Julie initially calls out to get Céline’s attention, she quickly shifts from being a good samaritan into an unsubtle stalker. But, as is the case for much of Céline and Julie’s relationship, their roles flip flop, and Céline is soon stalking Julie in the library.

The film continues, looking at the girls’ co-interests in magic and taunting men, introducing the possibilty of a lesbian affair between the two, while the real meat of the film is only lurking in its second half. What I thought was going to be a fun, simple film about the relationship between these girls turned into a complex and exhausting meta-movie. The film complicates itself repeatedly, but it is refreshing, because Rivette is clearly having such a good time with it. While Lynch shows the filmmaking process as an ominous mystery, like playing a score of Penderecki as characters burn holes in silk fabric with cigarettes to look through to the ‘fictional’ version of their lives, Rivette has his characters suck on colorful candy that looks like Jolly Ranchers, cutting back and forth between a tacky soap opera/whodunnit and shots of Céline and Julie sitting attentively, laughing hysterically at what they are seeing.

The pacing of the film is all over the place, just as the film bounces around from one genre to the next. The repetition of the middle third of the film does become hazy, but I was never bored or irritated. The last thirty minutes of the film, though, in which Céline and Julie manage to enter the mansion together, is an explosion of pure entertainment. It is the definition of a climax in a film, putting everything from the film’s first two and a half hours to use. Watching the girls interact, physically and fully aware, with the world that they have been itching to play with throughout the entire film, is exhilarating and hilarious. The mirror scene, in particular, was its own mini masterpiece, a perfect summary of their relationship. But it isn’t all just fun a games; there are some genuinely unsettling things happening in this mansion. The decor, lighting, and camera placement reminded me of the iciness of The Shining, and the characters of the melodrama feel like ghosts who are stuck in a Groundhog Day-like limbo in which they must recreate the same story every day for eternity. Are there people in my DVDs, reenacting the movies over and over again, waiting for me to come in and join/rescue them? This film makes me wonder…

This film is part of a ‘Human Rights Watch’ festival that is currently taking place at the Cinematheque Ontario. The film follows a cluster of Bosnian women and girls who try to continue making a living after the men in their lives have been taken by war. The women, who already have a shaky footing in life, are disturbed by two men who show up trying to get their signatures in order to acquire their land. As their success in this endeavor becomes evident, tensions build in the women and in the plot. My main problem with the film is that the women had very little redeeming value; I think that the absence of men had somehow put all of them on permanent PMS overdrive, and I couldn’t stand any of them. While this is probably the point, it made for an irritating two hours. While a similar plot synopsis can be drawn from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the difference is that Almodóvar sees the humor of the situation and lacks pretension. The film only manages to become a bit more interesting by including a few elements of magical realism.

I’ve noticed recently that magic and spiritual realism have been making a huge comeback in the art and film communities so far this century. On a recent trip to New York, almost every gallery and museum that I went into had some sort of exhibition up that showed work by artists who are studying miracles, ghosts, Zen meditation and hypnosis, religious parades, divine lights, etc. Films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Semih Kaplanolgu take notice of ethereal and folkish occurrences in the quaint lives of their protagonists, and acknowledge the religious experience of witnessing an ominous light or vacuum, some natural, some man made. My main annoyance with Snow, is that it has the pieces to have been an important human rights or magical realism entry, but is significant to either because it handles these elements absurdly and makes it all look silly. A boy who goes through a brief stint of aging rapidly when he has a traumatic experience made me laugh and then cringe, as the boy is suddenly shown with much longer hair (I think pretty obviously a wig) at one point. Several people in my theatre giggled, but at least I finally understood why Begic felt the need to insert abrupt chapter breaks that told me what day it was, as it initially seemed as if either a large chunk of time had unexpectedly passed, or the boy was playing a silly game on everyone. Not to mention the snow in the last scene of 1997, a Magnolia or Haggis-Crash-esque divine sign of exhaustion and fateful intervention.

Certainly my least favorite of the Death trilogy, I think that viewing the trilogy out of order diminished the potency of Gerry for me. Had I seen Gerry when it was first released in the cinema as a follow up to Finding Forrester, I think that the sparseness and ambition of it would have been more jarring. I mean, it’s unsettling enough seeing a film with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck; who knew Damon would be willing to make a film with the other Affleck? As each film in the trilogy is based on a story that Van Sant read in the newspaper (two hikers getting lost in the desert, school shootings, Cobain’s death) I think that the shuffled Bostonian pairing must be at least somewhat significant to Van Sant’s pop culture obsessions. Van Sant credits Bela Tarr in the closing credits, who seems to be one of the main influences for this new style that Van Sant pulled out of the air. Though I think that the borrowed tracking shots and tone are welcome and fitting for these films, Gerry ever reaches the realistic mysticism of Tarr’s work (which I think he does reach in Elephant and Last Days). While moments of this film are hypnotic and beautiful, the meandering becomes, not boring like so many people complain, but tired. Some reviews I’ve read suggest this ‘would make a great short’ but I think that much of the endless wandering is essential. Perhaps shortening it to, a still feature length, 55 or 60 minutes would fit it well. I normally frown on suggestions for abbreviating films where ‘nothing happens,’ but I don’t get anything about of the 55min.-85min. segment of the film that I didn’t get in the first 45 minutes.

That said, there are a lot of interesting things happening in the film. The name/term gerry is used to describe turns and detours, and is also both characters nicknames (I thought it was their God-given names, but Van Sant has said that their names are never said, and they only call each other Gerry). This is one of a few suggestions that Affleck and Damon’s characters are each half of the same character, Damon’s. One is more logical in his attempts to navigate the desert while the other is more instinctual. There isn’t much dialogue in the film, so there are only a few arguments for or against this theory. The death/murder/mercy killing at the end becomes much more interesting if it is in fact one person instead of two, while as a more straight forward narrative it is sad but predictable. The death scene is also notable as it is the most subtle example of spontaneous homoeroticism of any of the films in the trilogy; it was strange to see what I expected to be an imminent lovemaking scene turn into a murder. Finding the road at the end was unsatisfying for me, in the same way that the last scene of The Mist kills the tragedy of the film, despite it being an attempt at making the situation more devastating.

This is my first Wadja film, who I might be ashamed to say I never even heard of until the Criterion Collection announced their upcoming Danton DVD. Seeing Katyn, I was initially somewhat surprised at how standard the film was. It is very similar in tone and appearance to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It does do a few interesting things though. The film follows several different stories, all of them stemming from the Polish prisoner-of-war Andrej. The cinematography is desaturated and browned slightly for an older, gritty look that makes the periodic leaps into archival film stock of the events at Katyn Forest feel like less of a separation in time. The acting is competent throughout, but I don’t think that anything necessarily stands out exceptionally. The film is difficult to write about because it is absolutely a ‘good’ film, but it doesn’t really good anything really interesting or really wrong. It’s a well-made historical document about an event that I was unaware of, and it compellingly brought it to my attention.

As a film by a supposed ‘auteur’ I was underwhelmed because of how objective and textbook it seemed to be. The most interesting thing about the film is its inclusion of very Catholic sensibilities, most notably the film’s final line being the Lord’s Prayer by a succession of men being offed one after another, closing on a shot of a fist-clenched rosary. It was strange and refreshing to see a film set in Europe in the 1940s, about an event in which thousands of innocents were killed, and for the religious bent to be Christian. The film doesn’t feel religious, though; it is definitely about the killing and repressed standards of living in wartime.

Other interesting moments involve small stories such as the young guy who ripped down a Stalin poster and was subsequently chased by Soviet soldiers until he had to run into oncoming traffic and was killed by a car. The Soviets were not certain to kill or even detain this boy, but I still viewed the circumstance as a murder. The ultimate force, then, was their threats, and not necessarily their actions.

I’m certainly gald that I saw Katyn, but it doesn’t make me want to seek out more Wadja. The slaughter of Katyn Forest is devastating and important for everyone to know about, but this film does aim to progress the genre.

Long live the new flesh, indeed. I was fascinated with this Crash, the only Crash that should exist, but I still felt like it was a bit too much of a rearrangement and sexed-up version of the same films that Cronenberg had been making up until this point. It is more polished than anything up to this point, though, and is probably the best stand-alone film other than The Fly that I have seen by him. I often hear an opinion from people who confuse David Cronenberg with David Lynch because they are both weird, North American Davids working with a lot of violence and a lot of sex. But, I think that they have both been mislabeled for the sex in their films, which I don’t think there is even that much of at all. Lynch is on most people’s radars for the lesbian scene in Mulholland Dr.; the only time I’ve seen that film on the big screen was at the Coolidge Corner Theatre as part of their ‘Films that turn us on’ series. And I think that Cronenberg has similarly been branded for excessive sexuality in his films because of Crash, though his other films only have brief moments. Crash also has a lot in common with Wild at Heart, especially in these films’ presentations of sex.

Also similar to Lynch, and even more than him, Cronenberg’s characters have a stilted, 90s way of delivering their lines that was initially offputting for me been I first saw History of Violence. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad acting, but I think that these films very much come from and are influenced by common made-for-television movies-of-the-week and soft porn styles and conventions, and they seek to descontruct and demolish what those films stand for. While Lynch dissects and obliterates American ideals and fantasies, Cronenberg uses Crash to expose naive perceptions created by ‘movie sex’. The first few sex scenes, the first one at the plane, Spader’s early sex scenes, especially the ones in cars, all play like Red Shoe Diaries episodes. Tacky dramatic lighting, slow-mo thrusting, breezy music. The movie slowly but surely evolves away from that into a disturbing sado-masochistic fetish for car crashes. Characters reveal bizarre intentions and turn-ons that seems all the more crazy because of how the film was set up. The film asks the viewer to be open-minded toward such fetishes and non-vanilla sex, but it is difficulty to see the appeal of dismemberment, scars, and disability. The film successfully stretched my liberalism toward sex until it couldn’t be stretched anymore.

The characters in this film, like so many of Cronenberg’s films, can only be truly happy when they can remove themselves from their humanity, always working and building toward a more digital or mechanical way of being. Thus, it is consistent and important to Cronenberg body of work. However, I think that with this film he started showing signs of exhausting the idea, and he has since, thankfully, been moving into different but relative territory.