You have to look for it, but the level of craftsmanship here is astounding. The philosophical foundation of this film - tolerance, desire, poetic romanticism in the face of the Pruitanical oppression of Eros, a simple fact of mammalian existence, is set before us like a fragile souffle. Were I a professor of film aesthetics, this puppy would be on the agenda for certain. The micro expressions of the inspired acting stable here, alone are worth the price of admission. That's what the movies are, as opposed to TV - subtlety of expression which lands us a bit closer to Heaven.
Reviews
6 Reviews
The Room
(2003)
God Help Us
4 July 2019
As i write this, I weep for the future of humanity. The Room is an existential masterpiece, an exemplar of what not to do in a way that will enliven any film discussion group towards an awareness that life is mockery and life, arm in arm with its Vaudeville exotic dance partner, death, should be treated as such. Thank you dear Tom, for recalibrating the great and universal yardstick of aesthetics before which we all lay prostrate in humble absent mindedness and a delicious, if abject, shrug of the shoulder. The Room has taken possession of my soul, I can speak no further.
Renegade
(2004)
Trippy
27 June 2019
Magic hallucinographic camera work brings you to a place of meaning. Strange and piercing, beautifully realized, moment to moment intensity, much more than its constituent parts. There is a serene grittiness to the ritual of film watching in this movie and I'm only 10 minutes into it. Most visionary films are impersonal, devoted to generalities and archetypes. This film is personal, almost quirky, yet relevant in its native originality. We see situations that are reminiscent of some distant calling yet brought to an immediate unfolding of growth and the danger of independent growth. One might be entertained by this motion picture if self comparison can be called entertainment.
Some Guy Who Kills People
(2011)
About 7 miles beyond hip
21 June 2019
Surprisingly prescient insights into human psychology from a zone that detects the many dancing tangled ironies of human existence. The script is genius and lets Karen Black kick a hole in the space time continuum. For anyone with a wry sense of humor, a dim view of the human weltanchung and a perky antenna set able to receive messages from the great aesthetic in the sky, this movie will tickle your costals up one side and down the other while making your muse gasp for more. Ariel Gade as Amy is the perfect archetype of the wise beyond her years hoped for angel of deliverance. One would wish that the imperative to rid the world of evil would not involve homicide, but, gosh darn, some people just need killin'.... but in a darkly humorous manner in the sparkly service of justice. This film has brains and if don't have any, you prolly won't want to join the party.
Black Rain
(1989)
I could teach film theory from this
20 June 2019
Scott is subtle in a lot of ways and manages to evade a forest of cliches in this cop in Babylon trope. Consequently, a bit tropish at first, it becomes evident in the last half of the saga that each scene is studied and worthy of admiration as an exemplar of the genre and its expertise in art direction, lighting and camera work Scott's work is worthy of study, less as a matter of period kitsch than of mastery of the filmic language and it's various didactic overtones.
Slow West
(2015)
Murky and Surreal But Not Surreal Enough
28 June 2015
Warning: Spoilers
Flashes of wit do not salvage this film, which is too bad because it could have been a serious offbeat Western. The night scenes were murky, the flashbacks distractingly hard to decipher and the series of situations were either clichéd or unbelievable. The scene where Jay meets an itinerant anthropologist writing about the plight of the Indians is a nosebleed. The writer is kind, helpful, cheerful...all the Boy Scout virtues yet ends up stealing Jay's horse and gear as the he sleeps. The writer is traveling in a well provisioned wagon, has no need of theft, yet we are jerked around by this gratuitous non sequitur. The message is what- you can't trust anyone? Everyone is a sociopath? This premise is a distortion of the actual heroic social dynamics that a harsh environment brings out in people and is a reflection of the inaccurate if politically correct lens we look back in time with.
The unreality of the script is highlighted when Jay complains to his guide/mentor, Silas, "You are always dissing me". Like they spoke ghetto hip hop slang in the Wild West!? The scene where they are drying their clothes via a clothesline slung between their two horses created a schizoid tension in my mind when I wanted to credit the kid with inventiveness, yet he exhibits this quality nowhere else in the film, and it stretched my "suspension of disbelief" while the clothes necessarily end up dragging in the dirt and the clothesline later defeats two Indian horse thieves in a presumably humorous scene marred by the overhanging dread of the scene taking place in sacred Indian ground.
The usual clichés about the treatment of Indians at the hands of the white man are given little context other than what the viewer supplies from contemporary exposure to Native American issues. The movie opens with an encounter with "Indian Slayers" with no supporting context other than the current politicized presumption that the Wild West was populated solely with murderous sociopaths- an historic untruth.
Yes, flashes of wit and brilliance. The chance encounter in the middle of nowhere with 3 Congolese musicians, singing a traditional African song while one drums on a box he's sitting atop, was surreal and delightful. The extreme, almost compulsive, order and neatness of Rose's house that was the object of the odyssey, was a fresh and surreal take on the roughness of pioneer living and one hated to see the gunfight chaos that later nearly destroyed the place. The character of Kotori, the Indian handyman and probable lover of Rose, was quirky yet engaging. I wanted to see more of him but that doesn't happen and he also gets killed in the climactic gunfight Armageddon. The scene where Jay tries on a suit of clothes for sale at a remote general store and finds a bloody bullet hole in it was hilarious. And the kid stopping an arrow with his hand was a catchy surreal twist of luck. I wanted to see much more of this sort of twisted and unpredictable Fate.
I mean, it's OK to do unbelievable stuff in a film if you are working in the realm of surreal metaphor and irony. But the disjointed nature of the story line with flashbacks that didn't work made the moments of humor (and even moments of story telling elegance as the two protagonists remove a buffalo skeleton that is blocking a narrow canyon passageway) as lonely as the scenic backdrop to the film. It was also disturbing that the kid's phenomenal good luck through a series of misadventures runs out in the end, as though Fate had nothing better to do than smack down the worthy and heroic. In spite of its faults the film is watchable and engaging and there was enough to enjoy in the cinematography and isolated situations of the plot odyssey. Had the filmmakers gone all the way with their bizarre takes and chance encounters, this could have been a cult western on a par with any of the old Spaghetti Westerns.
Oh yeah, lemme add my impatience with people who post reviews on IMDb that waste time going over the plot and story line. I mean, isn't that available at the head of the IMDb entry? Just tell us what you liked and disliked in the film. Retelling the story is not a review or a criticism. A good criticism will bring out the salient plot elements as it develops, yes?
The unreality of the script is highlighted when Jay complains to his guide/mentor, Silas, "You are always dissing me". Like they spoke ghetto hip hop slang in the Wild West!? The scene where they are drying their clothes via a clothesline slung between their two horses created a schizoid tension in my mind when I wanted to credit the kid with inventiveness, yet he exhibits this quality nowhere else in the film, and it stretched my "suspension of disbelief" while the clothes necessarily end up dragging in the dirt and the clothesline later defeats two Indian horse thieves in a presumably humorous scene marred by the overhanging dread of the scene taking place in sacred Indian ground.
The usual clichés about the treatment of Indians at the hands of the white man are given little context other than what the viewer supplies from contemporary exposure to Native American issues. The movie opens with an encounter with "Indian Slayers" with no supporting context other than the current politicized presumption that the Wild West was populated solely with murderous sociopaths- an historic untruth.
Yes, flashes of wit and brilliance. The chance encounter in the middle of nowhere with 3 Congolese musicians, singing a traditional African song while one drums on a box he's sitting atop, was surreal and delightful. The extreme, almost compulsive, order and neatness of Rose's house that was the object of the odyssey, was a fresh and surreal take on the roughness of pioneer living and one hated to see the gunfight chaos that later nearly destroyed the place. The character of Kotori, the Indian handyman and probable lover of Rose, was quirky yet engaging. I wanted to see more of him but that doesn't happen and he also gets killed in the climactic gunfight Armageddon. The scene where Jay tries on a suit of clothes for sale at a remote general store and finds a bloody bullet hole in it was hilarious. And the kid stopping an arrow with his hand was a catchy surreal twist of luck. I wanted to see much more of this sort of twisted and unpredictable Fate.
I mean, it's OK to do unbelievable stuff in a film if you are working in the realm of surreal metaphor and irony. But the disjointed nature of the story line with flashbacks that didn't work made the moments of humor (and even moments of story telling elegance as the two protagonists remove a buffalo skeleton that is blocking a narrow canyon passageway) as lonely as the scenic backdrop to the film. It was also disturbing that the kid's phenomenal good luck through a series of misadventures runs out in the end, as though Fate had nothing better to do than smack down the worthy and heroic. In spite of its faults the film is watchable and engaging and there was enough to enjoy in the cinematography and isolated situations of the plot odyssey. Had the filmmakers gone all the way with their bizarre takes and chance encounters, this could have been a cult western on a par with any of the old Spaghetti Westerns.
Oh yeah, lemme add my impatience with people who post reviews on IMDb that waste time going over the plot and story line. I mean, isn't that available at the head of the IMDb entry? Just tell us what you liked and disliked in the film. Retelling the story is not a review or a criticism. A good criticism will bring out the salient plot elements as it develops, yes?
Tell Your Friends