Medieval Horror Chiller Theater

Watching Beowulf in digital 3D, I’d occasionally “ooh” or “ah” at a very long track back through snow-covered tree branches or men grounding a boat at a great distance from our perspective on a beach made of millions of carefully-rendered grey rocks.

Otherwise, the film sucked. Complete waste of time, unless you like yelling. Oh, maybe Crispin Glover’s interesting–gives his most intelligible performance in garbled pidgin Middle English, with his lower jaw jutting to the right (I kept waiting for him to tell me about sling blades) and oozing blood and pus and mucus from every pore.

Killer of Sheep

I’m interested in what you all think of this, not least because there is probably some experience of student films produced on a tiny budget on this blog. The only reference I can find to it here was a comment from Michael earlier this year about the problems getting the movie released because the songs used on the soundtrack had not been licensed. In any case, this was made by Charles Burnett (of To Sleep With Anger and Glass Shield) for $10K in 1977. It has only just been released on DVD and it is a revelation. Done in documentary style, in black and white, the camera just captures life in South Central LA, presumably contemporaneously, though there is a 1940s almost rural feel to many of the scenes. It is unlike any depiction of urban African American life I have seen (and of course The Wire is much on my mind right now). There is a joyousness on the part of the characters, especially the children who are playing in and on vacant lots, railyards, rooftops and so on, and Burnett shows a deep affection for his characters. It is just poor people working away on their lives (one of the best lines has a character actor explain that he is not poor because he gives stuff away to the Salvation Army). The explosion of films in the 1990s about South Central gang warfare seems a million miles away. The DVD comes with a commentary track and three other Burnett shorts, all worth watching. The first, dating from 1969 looks like a study for Killer of Sheep. Oh, and the soundtrack is incredibly good.

But my real question is: how can a film maker this good have made so few films of note? Apart from Killer and the two I mentioned above, it is a very thin resume including a fair amount of forgettable TV.

Do My Work for Me!

well, comrades, I’d like to pick your brains. It is time again for me to wrack my brains for a theme for my writing courses for next semester, and in my half-assed way I have come up with a title but no content. “Film and Global History”–how’s that for vague and overweening? anyway, what I want is a combination of readings (literary, essays, commentary) and films that explore the relations between recent global history and film, particularly films that might look at American experience from an international point of view. So far the only film I have decided on is the remarkable documentary (now available on DVD) The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On . any suggestions? I am wary of the earnest historical film (which many of them would love!)–say, those of the Schindler’s List variety–so I’d particularly like black comedies, absurdist farces about horrific events, obscure avant-garde exercises and squirm-inducing documentaries. if you know of readings and films that would work particularly well together, let me know.

man push cart

i have no idea, now, how i got onto this film. i wish i knew. ramin bahrani visits some of the same haunted post-traumatic territory touched upon in red road, and it seems to me he may possibly do it with even greater focus. ahmad is a young pakistani man with a push cart and a stack of porn dvds in nyc. very early every morning he takes his push cart from the depot where it’s housed to his allotted spot on the sidewalk, by hand. after work he sells his dvds to people he meets on the street. the pulling of the cart in the liminal area between the large, heavy trafficked, still nocturnal new york avenue and the sidewalk is harrowing and, on occasion, heartbreaking, especially because bahrani puts it squarely at the center of his film and shows it to us over and over and over (it also puts one in mind of those films one has seen about subcontinental streets, full of lawless traffic and the constant threat of being run over: except, wrong time, wrong place). the light is orange-brownish and there are mostly taxis about. ahmad looks like the loneliest man in new york. Continue reading man push cart

I’m Not There

Caught an early screening of the new Todd Haynes film tonight. I’m thinking I should have taken a few notes. Haynes is deconstructing the bio-pic from every angle while urgently demystifying the mythologies swirling around a mercurial artist like Bob Dylan . . . and it mostly works, up to a point, though the thing is messy and insidery (hell, I have no idea who Sara Lownds is). It didn’t help sitting in an audience full of Dylan purists (it is Minnesota after all) who hung on every slippery yet iconic image Haynes was willing to offer up. Still, I’m not going to call it a mess nor do I think it is overtly intellectual. As you’ve probably heard, Haynes cast six actors to take on his vision of “Bob Dylan;” there’s the eleven-year-old black kid singin’ the blues and riding the trains, the twenty-year-old poet (Dylan as Rimbaud), the intensely politicized folk singer turned Christian evangelical, the plugged-in rock-n-roll asshole, the celebrity movie star misogynist, and the runaway cowboy hiding out from the law. Variations on Alan Ginsberg, Jean Baez, Lownds, the Beatles, and Edie Sedgwick also move in and out of the scenes. Haynes lovingly quotes Fellini, D.A. Pennebaker, Godard, seventies style talking-head documentaries, Sam Peckinpah, Conrad Hall, and others. Ultimately, the film appears to be an insightful meditation on race, power, identity, celebrity, America, war, sex, conformity, freedom, etc., but mostly the film sounds a discordantly pessimistic note as it interrogates the notion that any artist can and/or should be held responsible for advocating social justice and inciting social change. Haynes’ Dylan is a supremely narcissistic chameleon unwilling and perhaps unable to speak for any generation. If you want to keep a low profile, never create anything one of the Dylans remarks to the camera. Embedded within the act of creation are the seeds of destruction . . . and it’s the destruction, man . . . it’s the destruction that’s blowing in the wind. The times, they don’t seem to be changing one damn bit.

American Gangster

The title refers to Frank Lucas, who controlled a big chunk of the New York heroin trade for the first half of the 1970s. The movie follows two parallel tracks: first the rise of Lucas, played by Denzel Washington; second, the efforts of Ritchie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe, to catch him. This is enjoyable, and the first half is compelling, but somehow it didn’t quite cohere for me. Continue reading American Gangster

Other kinds of horror

Rather than a sneaky, smirky post on this under my Halloween thread, Hubert Sauper’s documentary Darwin’s Nightmare deserves its own focus. Ostensibly the title comes from the ecological fuck-up extraordinaire in Lake Victoria, where the introduction of the Nile Perch–while economically a boon–has been an environmental disaster, decimating other fish species. But, as noted, these fish created a booming fish export industry in the surrounding cities and villages… Continue reading Other kinds of horror

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

This is a classic martial arts movie from 1978, though I had never seen it. A remastered version with some good extras was just released by the Weinstein brothers’ Dragon Dynasty label and Netflix has it, though there was a long wait. Starring Gordon Liu in his prime, and opening with the ShawScope logo, you can see why Tarantino wanted to recreate some of its feel in Kill Bill.

In any case, it is very good. The plot line has a young rebel going to a Shaolin temple to learn kung fu in order to fight off the tartar hordes who have invaded China. 35 chambers teach elements of the art of kung fu, each more advanced than the one before (again, the scene in which the Bride is trained — by Godon Liu — in KB vol 2 explicitly harks back to this part of the movie). The 36th chamber involves a dispute over whether Buddhist monks should be training the masses to fight the invaders. Good, old-fashioned martial arts scenes with no wires and remarkably little cutting. Recommended.

Ten Canoes

A really fine film. Rolf de Heer (who did the very, very, very different Bad Boy Bubby) here works with Peter Djigirr and the people of Ramingining to shape a story that recounts a distant cultural past and evokes a distant storytelling tradition. The film has two frames: as the camera languorously pans over and through remote Arnhem land in northern Australia, a narrator talks to us of his ancestors and of stories told; we eventually come upon a group of men, making canoes to hunt geese, one of whom begins to tell his younger brother a tale of misplaced love in the distant past; the ‘central’ story is that tale told, in the tale told. (And even in that told, when characters imagine or hypothesize about what has happened or might happen, we get enactments–stories unfolding within the story, within a story.) The film moves back and forth, playing with our expectations (the narrator laughing at our impatience). Continue reading Ten Canoes