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.

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.