Month: March 2008

Dan in Real Life and Doomsday

I saw two movies this weekend, and one was a hateful bit of crass tripe, stitching together bits of other better movies into a shoddy mass-produced mash-up, with a migraine-inducing soundtrack and not a whit of honest human compassion or sympathy.

And the other was Doomsday.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I knew I would love Doomsday when, out of a crowd of terrified Scots trying to escape the plague through a quickly closing security wall, one man reaches his hand forward, and we see not one but three separate shots, from different angles, of that hand brutally squashed off, blood and gristle spurting everywhere. I knew I would not love Dan when, after an opening which established the bare bones of silly-grieving-father trying to control his three sassy daughters while forgoing his own life, there were not three separate shots of Steve Carell’s hand brutally squashed off, blood and gristle spurting everywhere as the emo-indie-folkie on the soundtrack noodled away on a guitar only to be moments later exploded under the wheels of an armored personnel carrier.

Khadak

A lovely film pitched as a “fable” from Mongolia ended up being stranger, more conventionally (or is that unconventionally) avant-garde than I’d expected. It riffs on an underlying sense of myth: a young nomadic sheepherder, in the bouts of epilepsy, has visions which lead him to combat the forces of modernity. But from its cold opening onward, the movie works a different kind of magic. A woman in a static shot stares at the camera, a multi-colored abstract mural on the wall behind seeming like some strange kind of halo; after some long gaze she begins (slowly) counting, and as the numbers go up she struggles to maintain her composure, gripped by an inexplicable sadness. I was hooked.

The film is more poem than narrative, and I was engrossed by how its opaque, allusive plot recedes so that the wash and connectivity of the film’s gorgeous imagery carries you along. I can’t remember where I heard about this, but I liked it.

Moolaade

Ousmane Sembene’s last film manages to keep its focus tight on one community, to weave in warmth and humor and a real sense of pleasure in the everyday, while tackling the big issue of female genital mutilation. It doesn’t preach, doesn’t lay on the horrors with a trowel, in fact while being terribly moving it’s not really melodramatic….

By keeping such a focus and tone, the politics of the movie–and its feminist ethos–also remains local, and hopeful. The challenges to the ritual practice emerge from certain women’s resistance, and their critique ripples out through and changes the community. The men blame the outside world, only audible via the radios all the women listen to, but the women’s resistance is carefully orchestrated and illustrated as entirely organic. If any of you folks do see this, I’d love to discuss its approach to politics more, what seems like the film’s disinterest in (or refutation of) the “postcolonial” or global as the engine of change…..

But don’t see it just to talk abstractions or political theory. It’s a very strong, lovely, small-scale film, deceptively simple and naturalistic.

Days of Heaven (1978)

Last summer I tried to watch The Thin Red Line. I didn’t get too far. All of the huge name actors showing up throughout reminded me too much of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what Terrence Malick was going for. (Isn’t Phil Silvers in the Thin Red Line for a minute?)

The New World, well, Colin Farrell insured that I’d stay away from that one. But I was really struck by the cinematography of the Assassination of Jesse James, which of course got compared – poorly often – to Malick, though I thought the shots there were quite beautiful.

So, heartened by its 90 minute running time, I picked up the new Criterion edition of Days of Heaven. Anyone seen this recently? It’s really an impressive piece of work. The cinematography, of course, but also Sam Shepard’s performance – just the way his face looked throughout – was wonderful. Richard Gere, alas, looked like Richard Gere. Usually movies in the 1970s had the decency to cast actors who didn’t look like freaking models from the pages of Vogue. Except for Gere. He looks like the Fonz when he’s supposed to be working in a filthy Chicago factory.
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