Author name: Blake Williams

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.

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.