Author name: Blake Williams

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.

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.