Month: September 2007

i’d wanted to watch this argentinean film when it was released in los angeles back in 2001, but it disappeared before i could get my lazy ass off the couch. a friend mentioned watching it recently and so i put it at the top of the netflix queue and watched it last night. netflix lists it as a comedy but it didn’t feel like one to me. it is a claustrophobic portrayal of an upper-middle (?) class family going to seed, in which humidity and heat and lassitude are not just metaphors but almost characters in their own right. a large family is gathered at their decrepit country estate for the summer, and are visited briefly by cousins from the city. family secrets and shame slowly bubble out and much more is hinted at. the story of an indian maid, who may or may not be fired soon (by the casually, viciously racist mother, mecha), winds in and out, seen largely through the ambivalent gaze of a teenage daughter of the house who has a crush on her. the possibility of catastrophic violence seems always very close, and the film sustains this pregnant sense of imminent release quite effectively.

nonetheless, i found the film frustrating in parts–it took me too long to sort out which characters were in which family, for example–and i think because it is so effective in making the oppressive, sluggish atmosphere of the principal characters’ lives palpable, you might need to be in the right state of mind to watch it: it may not be the best choice of film to watch at the end of a long day. that said, i do think the film meanders a little. there’s a parallel narrative with a sighting of the virgin mary that didn’t quite fit for me, and the class/race critique could have had a little more bite. the more interesting characters for me were the indian maid, isabel, and the poorer city cousin, tali, but the director (lucrecia martel) seems more interested in mecha’s family. it didn’t finally come together for me, and i found the ending somewhat arbitrary. but it is an interesting film (and the performances are all great), and i’d be interested in reading others’ takes on it. and i’m going to watch the other film by martel that netflix has: the holy girl.

Kris is watching “The Office,” episodes I saw late last night, so I wandered upstairs and decided to see what Netflix might offer for instant queuing. I fancied the moment akin to me old college days, when I was green in judgment and grateful for whatever hack horror film I could muster up on cable, so I consciously sought out some crap I would probably never allow myself to actually have sent to my home, simply because it’d seem too much like paying to see them. (And, for any of you who’ve questioned my judgment, you can imagine what someone with my almost degree-zero lack of taste might prefer not to pay to see.) So I found a little early-nineties horror-satire called Satan’s Little Helper, the work of one Jeff Lieberman who various very interesting fan blogs call an unsung hero of indie popcorn horror. (Check out the fantastic final girl blog.)

That all said, and I’d be wasting your time if you had anything worth doing, which you don’t, Little Helper wants to be a satire of our love of violence, always a tricky move best attempted in a genre other than brutal-killers-on-the-road or slasher flick. It’s intermittently interesting, but shot on a budget that would be pleased to be called shoestring, with atrocious acting especially from the terrible eponymous kid Helper, but I did think the thing had some pizzazz and style in its almost classical framing, editing, and development. I enjoyed a little of its manic violent (‘though actually fairly non-graphic and muted violent) wit. Still, it’d have been a lot more fun at 2 a.m. on Cinemax, me half in the bag.

But now I had this itch. What to do? And I remembered, since Jeff recently taught the film and wondered what I’d thought of it, that I had yet to watch my downloaded copy of Martin McDonagh’s academy-award-winning short film Six Shooter. It’s outstanding–funny, vicious, strangely moving. Continue reading I’d’ve shot Marvin Gaye if I was Marvin Gaye’s dad

An intense character study of loneliness and mourning, tucked into a CCTV-p.o.v. portrait of grimmer Glasgow, disguised as a white-knuckled surveillance-age thriller, Andrea Arnold’s film follows a camera operator for the Scottish city’s string of public eyes, charged with tracking potential–and reporting actual–crimes. Borrowing neatly from Rear Window and The Conversation alike, the film also escapes its influences, wears them lightly on its sleeve. And I’m going to be cagy about what else happens in the film–burying it under the “more” and a big SPOILER tag–because the film is often quite surprising. Don’t want to undercut those pleasures.

Even as I tout this film, though, I want to first rave about one of the extras, the director’s short (and apparently Academy-Award-winning) Wasp, which in 23(ish) minutes packs a helluva wallop. Following a young single mom, trailing her three girls and lugging her infant boy, from an opening fight to their cluttered project flat to a night out on the town, the film seems to be both brilliantly composed and edited and yet caught on the fly–there are scenes in a bar that seem impossibly real, as if she had to be in there just filming. Yet it’s a gorgeous picture of dilapidated people and places, and edited with a virtuoso control–precisely crafted. This is a classic. Red Road is simply really damn good. Continue reading Andrea Arnold’s Red Road