I first heard about Daniel Johnston through Yo La Tengo. I bought a 7″ record that features sleeve art by Johnston. The recording is simple: Yo La Tengo calls Johnston at his home and asks him to sing “Speeding Motorcycle” into the phone while they play along in their studio. His voice, thin and raspy to begin with, sounds tiny and hurt as it comes through the receiver. But he sings with a lot of emotion and gets carried away. And if you look at the sleeve art while listening to the record, you pretty much get who Johnston is. It’s a drawing of him on stage strumming his guitar and singing “Speeding Motorcycle” with an adoring crowd cheering him on. The documentary sticks with this idea: Continue reading The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Category: (random lists)
Altman’s Quintet (1979) / Reel Paradise
Trying desperately to throw a couple of new things up here so that anyone can pipe in with things they’ve seen of late. I had low hopes for Quintet and high hopes for Reel Paradise, but neither one really met with my expectations.
I had never heard of Quintet. But geez – a late ’70s Altman sci-fi film starring Paul Newman? And featuring a macarbe version of backgammon in Earth’s “Last ice age”? Well, sign me up! This ddoes after all involve many of my favorite things: Paul Newman, backgammon (macabre backgammon no less), wild dogs, ruined relics of World’s Fairs past, Altman, and late 70s sci-fi. What could go wrong? Continue reading Altman’s Quintet (1979) / Reel Paradise
duck season
I watched this Mexican film last night, Duck Season, which was released by Warner Independent Pictures under Alfonso Cuarón’s deal with the studio. This is a charming, unforced, wry ensemble comedy about four characters who spend a lazy Sunday in a middle-class apartment complex in Mexico City. The apartment belongs to fourteen-year-old Flama, and it is currently something of a battleground as the kid’s parents are raging through a messy divorce. The one pleasure is Sundays when Flama’s mom travels to another city for the day leaving Flama and his best friend Moko alone to eat pizza, drink Coka-Cola and play video games. All is well until a power outage shuts down the game and then Flama’s sixteen-year-old neighbor, Rita, interrupts and asks to borrow his kitchen to bake a cake. When the pizza delivery man, Ulises (who looks to be in his mid to late-twenties), arrives eleven seconds late, Flama refuses to pay and Ulises refuses to leave. Continue reading duck season
v for vendetta
I don’t want to let ‘V for Vendetta’ enter obscurity without some mention on this blog. There are various complaints one could make about V, but it is still superior to most movies of the past year. It is a political thriller much more than an action movie, with a very real puzzle at its center. The story has been prettified from its comic book origins, and updated to include Iraq, but it remains a story about how fascism arrives in myriad small ways rather than a big bang, so that the tipping point between our present society and a fascist state is very hard to identify.
It is a remarkably smart movie about terrorism for this day and age, perhaps why critics had such a problem with it. Some of the dialogue, besides being quite beautiful, provides a far more intelligent discussion of the justifications for terrorism than anything on PBS or NPR.
And there are a series of strong and moving performances, of which Stephen Rea’s world weary police detective is the best.
Sketches Of Gehry
I don’t want to be particularly snarky about this one, though director and interviewer Sydney Pollack makes a rather tempting target. I like architecture and Gehry’s buildings can be staggering. LA’s Disney Music Hall is. Seattle’s EMP Museum isn’t. Billbao’s Guggenheim almost certainly is, though I’ve not seen it in person. Continue reading Sketches Of Gehry
Snakes on a Product Placement
The witness to a terrible gangland slaying, the mcguffin getting those motherfucking Snakes up onto the Plane, rather ostentatiously drains a can of Red Bull as he steps off his motorbike. The audience I was with laughed–if the can had been flashing neon, we couldn’t have been more savvy consumers, fully aware of how the movie was shilling before it began. A short while later (in the quick dispensing of plot), as the witness watches a tv news report about the slaying (and just before the goons come calling to gun him down), the camera slyly includes in the frame around the tv literally stacks of Red Bull cans, all wrapped in plastic. Five minutes and most of the plot later, the witness having been saved by FBI hero Sam Jackson is being cajoled/bullied into testifying, and the good guys toss on the table some evidence of him from the scene of the slaying: encased in a baggie, a drained can of Red Bull.
I really wanted to like Snakes, but the film is an aggressively smart-ass deployment of the crude tools of B-film without any of the smarts or real pleasure the best B-films and recreations of B-films offer. Continue reading Snakes on a Product Placement
TV
I’ve been catching up on last year’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, about which I have. It isn’t the masterpiece it once was, or perhaps (three episodes in) I see no gathering momentum, simply a solid funny half-hour of comedy. Its familiar rhythms and pacing and gags may not startle, but I’m still happy to see ’em.
I also either accepted the suckerbait or made an efficient decision, and ordered up the NBC promo disc for two new shows, available only on Netflix. Continue reading TV
Good Movie Season Around the Corner
Rather than continually posting in the old trailers thread, I thought I’d fire up a new one as finally there are some good movies on the horizon. For starters, I’m digging the trailer for the excellently titled The Last King of Scotland, which is of course about Idi Amin, and like everything in the 21st century, based on A True Story.
Clubland: Le Samourai
I’ll say more about my thoughts on the film later, but I thought I’d just get things rolling with a couple of topics/questions.
1. I find Melville’s film to be devastatingly emotional, beneath the laconic dialogue and cool surfaces (or should I say, “because of?”). Do genre films–or let’s say films within genres that work as a kind of apotheosis of the genre–pack more of a punch emotionally because they are playing on a set of expectations? In other words, is the constraint of genre really a kind of freedom?
2. I particularly like the way the film quietly explodes the idea of a stoic masculinity–actions are not expressions of a philosophy where gesture supplants internal life, but messages from a vast unknown territory. Of course, I am a bit taken aback when I read that Melville describes his protagonist Costello as a “psychopath.” Do you agree? If so, the film might be part of the discussion with Straw Dogs and White.
Continue reading Clubland: Le Samourai
Bank Dick (1940) W.C. Fields
I feel like I’ve not written anything about any movies I’ve seen lately, so I’ll type briefly about this one. I had never actually watched a whole WC Fields film before, and while the caricature of Fields is for the most part backed up by the film, it was much better than I expected.
The jokes tend to be quite cruel, with a nice emphasis on drinking and smoking; all right up my alley for humor, but I was surprised with what they got away with in a mainstream film. Maybe Fields could get away with more b/c of his stature? At one point early on, Fields’ daughter throws a bottle at him, hitting him in the back of the head as he is leaving the house. He groans, rubs his head and leaves. Then a few seconds later he opens the door with a huge potted plant and rears back to throw it across the room and crush the girl. His wife yells at him, and he holds off throwing it, but just barely. Continue reading Bank Dick (1940) W.C. Fields