The Last Wave —- directed by Peter Weir; released 1977 (seen for class) —- A staid and respectable (yet secretly sensitive!) Sydney lawyer gets drawn into the legal/metaphysical fog surrounding a case of ritual murder among supposedly Westernized urban Aborigines. Under the sway of premonitory eschatological visions and a strange sense of connection with the Aboriginal defendants, he estranges and endangers his own family. We are all pulled towards the titular impending catastrophe; there is a strange seduction in watching all the puzzle pieces of doom fall into place. Weir paints the heat of his Australian faces and landscapes in warm, taut, almost balmy colors, and you can taste the air in his anachronistic courtrooms, bourgeois houses and underground tunnels…

Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad) —- directed by Alain Resnais; screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet; released 1961 (I highly recommend the Criterion Collection edition) —- A man stalks a woman through a glacially opulent palace, where time, memory and emotion seem completely unhinged. As they gaze upon huge shadowless topiary, play sinister games of Nim, and enact hidden schemes of psychic violence, these characters negotiate a shared past that flits in and out of focus. The script, by novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, favors loaded minimalism, sinister repetition, and oblique variations on not-quite-graspable symbols. Whether the movie is about rape, love, repression, or merely an existential farce in the Beckett mold — Resnais never lets us know. Like those ominous games of Nim, the film is a cruel parlor game of mystery and manipulation…

Leaves of Grass —- directed by Tim Blake Nelson; released 2010 (seen with my mom) —- I wrote about this movie, a light but pleasant farce, here.

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) —- directed by Luchino Visconti; released 1963 (seen in the form of a crystal-clear, Gucci-restored print at the Charles Theater in Baltimore) —- I wrote about this film here for my school’s film blog, HopkinsCinemAddicts — and I will surely repost those humble paragraphs on The Smoldering Screen. In my post, I analyze the play of restraint and extravagance in this roughly three-hour film which is nominally about the tribulations of the Sicilian nobility during the Italian Risorgimento, but is truly about the inexorability of history, the negotiation of political expediency and personal dignity, and the dawning, melancholy realization of mortality.

Melancholia —- directed by Lars von Trier; released 2011 (seen with my sister and mother, the latter of which had to leave the theater ten minutes before *the end* due to nausea and lightheadedness, which was supposedly not caused, but may indeed have been caused, by the movie) —- Much has been made of Melancholia’s use of the Earth’s demise as an allegory for von Trier’s clinical depression. Whether this allegory works for you has less to do with your experience of depression and more to do with whether you grasp the characters as feeling people, or as so many kings and queens edging around an eschatological chessboard. I found the film’s second chapter (in which Charlotte Gainsbourg loses it as the end approaches) off-key, but the prologue (a series of ultra-slow motion and yet feverish tableaux) and the first chapter (a winkingly satirical wedding sequence, with Kirsten Dunst as the doubting bride) are opulent portraits of human motion in the face of total stasis.

Mind the Gap —- directed by seven different film-makers; released 2011 (seen late at night as part of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival) —- A program of seven experimental shorts of widely varying aim and quality, Mind the Gap lives hazily in my memory as a discomfiting experience, with some films cravenly adhering to the cliches of “experimental” cinema (Lynch-lite/Chloe Sevigny/lots of shots of TV screens), while others dissipate themselves in an effort to shock, abrade or exhaust audiences (25-minute blindingly repetitive “Cubist” experiments/redneck caricatures/lots of yelling.) Out of this mixed bag, the most pleasant surprise was Kerry Laitala’s “Chromatastic,” a druggy feast of colorful, endlessly-shifting abstractions presented in minimalist 3-D, recalling the microscopic cells and glacial nebulae of The Tree of Life.

My Joy —- directed by Sergei Loznitsa; played at Cannes in 2010, shown in San Francisco 2011 (seen as part of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival, with a largely shocked and confused audience) —-A taciturn yet fairly goodhearted trucker sets off with a cargo of flour into the Russian backcountry and is forced by detours, happenstance and mainly the palsied hand of fate into the backcountry’s backcountry: a hellish land still haunted by the traumas of two World Wars and morally degraded by centuries of exploitation and anomie. There, he runs into bandits, a teenage prostitute, a Circe-like gypsy and unspeakably corrupt police officers, all leading up to what might be called a fall into nihilistic resignation. Punctuated by bursts of totally arbitrary and yet wholly inevitable violence, My Joy is a political horror film — a bleak thematization of a country’s abuses and abusedness.

My Winnipeg —- directed by Guy Maddin; released 2007 —- I wrote about this film here for my school’s film blog, HopkinsCinemAddicts — and I will surely repost that short essay on The Smoldering Screen. Basically, this is an excellent, fascinating experimental documentary of sorts (whether it is more or less “documentary” than something like Waltz with Bashir is debatable) that’s well worth a watch for the local folklore dressed up in surreal Maddin-ite trappings, this despite a few minor flaws…

Photographic Memory —- directed by Ross McElwee; released 2011 (presented at my school in the presence of the film-maker himself, whom I was able to directly ask several questions) —- A fleetingly interesting home movie from the documentarian behind a supposedly more-than-fleetingly interesting film called Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (dat title!) McElwee’s new film awkwardly juxtaposes two marginally-related strands: 1) the director’s attempts to connect with his tritely rebellious, youthfully obnoxious son, and 2) the director’s visit to the Brittany town where he worked as a wedding photographer at his son’s age and where he now tries to track down his charismatic former employer Maurice and long-lost lover Maud. I wanted to dismiss the film as a sentimental doodle from a charming director too enamored of his own charm, but dammit if I didn’t end up mildly charmed by this slight investigation into time, memory and the multi-generational seductions of photography…

Psycho —- directed by Alfred Hitchcock; released 1960 (seen as part of a class I was TA’ing) —- Hitchcock had quite a visceral effect on me as a naive younger viewer, but his films have left me cold ever since I’ve become an educated cinephile or whatever. Since I don’t necessarily prize my present self over my past self, I’ll just say that Psycho works better the less you intellectualize it (easier said than done, what with the film’s heavily-interpreted, constantly-referenced, canonized status.) But if you can get past the bland disposability of the romantic leads and the unerotic obviousness of Hitchcock’s psychosexual manipulations, there is something appealingly blunt in the film’s play on light and shadow, and in Anthony Perkins’s oddly sympathetic portrayal of a Freudian killer.

Quills —- directed by Philip Kaufman; released 2000 —- A starkly comic telling of the Marquis de Sade’s internment at the Charenton insane asylum, with Geoffrey Rush as the increasingly desperate, nobly obscene Marquis, pushed by the twin duties of a) getting his philosophically liberal, prescient texts out to the world, and b) defiling as many nubile bodies as possible — whether they like it or not — and of instituting perpetual savage debauchery. The movie navigates this razor-thin ambiguity of character with grace, until a undertow of sentimentality creeps in near the end. Nice turns from Kate Winslet as a tragically liberated chambermaid, Joaquin Phoenix as a tortured priest, and Michael Caine as a viciously conservative inquisitor.

Red Desert (Il deserto rosso) —- directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; released 1964 (seen in the lovely Criterion Collection edition and then, in 2012, on the big screen at the Castro Theatre — and I have to say I found it more deeply affecting watched in the comfort and silence of my own home, though it looked great blown up in 35 mm) —- For his first color film, Antonioni rejects chromatic extravagance, favoring Rothko-esque variations on a subdued palette (matte pastels of grey and green and blue), with subtle shifts in color emanating from equally subtle shifts in the subjectivity of the film’s protagonist. This mood-eye belongs to Monica Vitti, here playing the anxiety-riddled wife of an industrialist. In a beautifully rotting landscape of stark factories, toxic fumes, garbage, and old cottages — a landscape left behind, just once, for a filmed foray into a richly saturated story-world — she wanders around, brittle and self-loathing, and contemplates an affair with her husband’s poised, melancholy colleague (Richard Harris), who seems to understand something of her loneliness. A tortured dream, one of my favorite films.

David Lynch’s repetitive (and baffling and eerie and witty) multi-episode rabbit-based sitcom Rabbits was originally released online in 2002 — then re-adapted into the director’s 2006 experimental mystery, the horrifying vortex of Hollywood melodrama known as Inland Empire. I must confess to never having watched Rabbits’s roughly 50-minute run in its entirety — only the segments featured in Inland Empire and a few scattered episodes online — but I don’t think you need to have seen the whole thing to be impressed (or irritated) by what Lynch is attempting. Certainly not a plot-driven narrative, nor perhaps a mere doodle, Rabbits — despite its online origins — has less in common with the serialized, small-screen model of a webseries than with the temporally-unmoored fixed-camera stasis-in-motion of video installation art. It’s hard to imagine anyone waiting with bated breath for the next episode of Rabbits, but it’s easy to imagine it looping on the back wall of some icy gallery or sinister party…

Anyways, the premise — what can be gleaned by watching the first episode on YouTube — is more or less as follows: three anthropomorphized rabbits (voiced by Mulholland Drive’s Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring and Scott Coffey) inhabit a grim room — part sitcom set, part underlit diorama — whose silence is alleviated only by Angelo Badalamenti’s somnolently ominous score, the rabbits’ occasional utterance of non-sequitur-y banalities, and the eruption of an insistent laugh track at seemingly inappropriate or arbitrary moments. Characters — in particular the male rabbit, Jack — come and go on mysterious errands, and the whole static composition seems freighted with unseen motives, a repressed psychological motion that doesn’t so much unmask itself as gurgle out, like volcanic lava at a fault-line that has been open, unchanging and geologically slow, for a million years.

The whole thing gives the impression of a sitcom that has run on for far too many seasons, shrinking to an almost Truman Show-like quotidian stasis, exhausting all dynamism, all exploration, all sense of linear time, until there is nothing real left to say, nothing to hide the aimless swarms of resentment and fear that have curdled and found nesting grounds, detached from all chronology and reference, in the pre-conscious and the everyday. Like a Dadaist or Burroughs-ian cut-up, Rabbits consists of dialogue that seems rearranged and detached from context, so that there is no arrow of time, but rather a constantly expanding and self-referencing file cabinet of tenuous meaning where past, present, and future coexist in glacial hibernation. As in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, Lynch frays the fabric of mundane cinematic structures (here, the cliche of the American sitcom) until a latent madness shines through. The result is frankly somewhat tedious and one-note — although “rigorously atmospheric” might be a better way to put it — but also oddly mesmerizing (in an ambient music sort of way) and well worth a look for any Lynch completists out there, or for anyone looking for something (what exactly?!) to decipher…

Whether there exist hidden networks of meaning in Rabbits (as there surely exist in MD, and possibly in IE), or whether I simply built those networks out of my own internalized grammar of sitcom archetypes and symbolic associations — well, my dear readers, “I am going to find out one day.”

A moth in flight.

I recently rewatched Maya Deren’s mind-bending 1943 short film Meshes of the Afternoon, an elegant and maddening experiment in dream-logic, recursion, subjective editing, and repeated symbolism. This made me want to share with you my thoughts on the film, in the form of a short essay I wrote for a film criticism class last fall (“Special Topics: Writing about Film.”) I hand it over to you uncorrected, minor flaws and half-cystallized qualities left standing. Enjoy!

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REFERENTIAL MANIA, IN THE SHADOW OF HOLLYWOOD PALMS
Meshes of the Afternoon [1943, Maya Deren]

It feels like a dozen times that I have tried to write about Maya Deren’s enigmatic short film, Meshes of the Afternoon, to no avail. I have attacked from every angle, tried to find fissures to hold onto in form, meaning, editing, history, every variable in the film’s image-consuming, image-producing mechanism. But every crack in the film’s armor that I latch onto soon reveals itself to be but the lip of a canyon, and before I know it I feel that I am writing a dissertation rather than a capsule review. Interpretations, counter-interpretations, symbols, precursors and patterns unfurl endlessly — a dizzying panoply of meaning-paths to explore. And so – stunted and chastened in my efforts – I find myself resorting to that most pitiable and solipsistic of critical strategies: self-reference, preemptive apology, problematization of the viewer rather than the film. Now you see how easy it is to get lost in Deren’s shadowy, disorienting forest of images.

The whole situation calls to mind Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols,” in which a pitiably deranged young man suffers from a psychopathology known as ‘referential mania.’ This fertile disorder — put by Nabokov to soaring metaphorical and meta-literary use, but not lacking in real-life correlates among drug-users, schizophrenics, and quite possibly us readers, dreamers and cinephiles — involves a bottomless grasping for symbolism, a paranoid tendency to see in indifferent reality perpetual encoded reference to the Self. In his ruthlessly crystalline prose, Nabokov describes the patient’s monstrous, sumptuous inner life:

Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.

This restless sensitivity to the “undulations of thing” — this need to see the tendrils of the world stretching into the ego — is characteristic not only of paranoia and madness, but also of that which we call dream-logic. And what is true of dream-logic is more often than not true of its close waking relation, film-logic. Meshes of the Afternoon of course embodies the oblique syntax of both these aesthetic cousins, and in so doing induces an especially palpitating strain of referential mania in the mind of the viewer, cross-fertilizing the recursion of dreams with the technical playfulness of cinema. We see the film-world become a shell for the mind of the protagonist (a sort of ambivalent noir heroine played by Deren herself, all black-clad sleekness and cascading curls) — a cloak that shakes, twists and billows in time with the feverish psychological rattling of its wearer. That these shakes, twists, and billowings are represented by a variety of illusionist cuts, unconventional angles and surreal digressions is the essence of Deren’s genius: she transforms film-language into a manifestation of human subjectivity.

Like “Signs and Symbols,” Meshes exploits sinister portents, malevolent objects and slanted cultural references to drown our minds in a moribund, self-reflexive tide of implications, premonitions and half-glimpsed shards of meaning. The most salutary effect of all this is that our interpretive reflexes are ignited and we grasp, vigorous and falcon-like, for some basal architecture of content. But it would be a mistake to say that Meshes’s appeal lies entirely in its ability to spur our parsing apparatus. Part of what makes the film so timeless and ambiguous is that it defeats the very interpretive processes that it stimulates. It multiplies referential pathways to such an extent that we begin to think of the hunt for meaning as futile, a sort of surface commotion. And so, running parallel to the reflex for meaning, there is also a competing reflex for form. We begin to see shapes, shadows, gestures, pathways as more essential than symbols and portents. And that is when Meshes starts to vacillate between its status as a reductive meaning-computer and its more abstract, perhaps more elemental status as a networked mechanism for consuming, encoding, and re-synthesizing archetypal images according to laws inscrutable to us and perhaps even to Deren.

Perhaps I’m getting too theoretical here… The fact of the matter is that Meshes of the Afternoon is ferociously entertaining, a perfect 13-and-a-half-minute kaleidoscope of techniques and genres. There is suspense, sexual malaise, philosophy, pulpy violence, histrionic acting, breaking of boundaries and crossing of thresholds. It’s a form of fun comfortably inserted in the Hollywood visual schema. This is, quite fundamentally, a Hollywood movie, infused with hallucinatory Los Angeles imagery: palm trees, hyper-aestheticized Modernist design, bourgeois decadence. It is therefore no surprise that the film has bred a surly brood of imaginative descendants — most obviously David Lynch’s “Los Angeles films,” namely Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire — films that similarly use objects and image sequences as pathways into a dream-world of shifting psychosexual menace.

Deren’s film, in short, has everything and nothing in it. It is both theoretical and experiential, and so provides the alert viewer with boundless avenues for mental strolling. Because it is constantly shifting — constantly looking back on itself and running away — it allows us to do the same, finding and evading ourselves by diving into worlds within worlds within worlds. This giving and taking, losing and finding, is at the core of cinephilic pleasure — and that is why Meshes of the Afternoon will always be wild and alive to me!

Das kleine Chaos (The Little Chaos) [1966, Rainer Werner Fassbinder]

This early film of Fassbinder’s was screened ahead of 1976’s Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese Roulette) by Johns Hopkins’s Hedgehog Film Club. While the latter film — reviewed by me, in brief, here — is an exercise in psychological control and visual decadence, the earlier short leans more towards anarchic abandon and formal leanness. The plot is gleefully nihilistic, with Fassbinder (or at least the character he plays) letting loose as if there is no law but the law of the movies — and all the gestures, cliches and transgressions they contain. Whether the film is really as Nouvelle-Vague-ishly iconoclastic as the images above seek to broadcast is up to you, but to me, it certainly feels like revolution…!

(As far as I can tell, the film is sadly only viewable in German — though a lot of panache does come across, even to a mediocre German speaker like me.)

(via strangewood)

Fragment #1: American Dad!

This post — which I see as about two-thirds finished — represents an inchoate but earnest attempt to dissect the Seth MacFarlane animation brand, which — despite not generally being seen as “high culture” — is nevertheless extremely popular, quite layered, alternately brilliant and mediocre, and has, for better or for worse, seeped into the minds of nearly everybody who watches TV, whether on their computer or — unlikely these days, imagine that — a television! In particular, I focus on American Dad!, my favorite of MacFarlane’s three network shows, trying to figure out which of its narrative traits make it somehow more earnest and less indulgent than its siblings… I have left this fragment completely unfinished and uncorrected, the better to expose its flaws to public ogling and contempt:

There’s a semiotics/philosophy-of-language lesson buried deep inside there somewhere. But mostly this gif just makes me want a doughnut. (Fun fact: I only like two kinds of doughnuts — Old Fashioned and French Crullers. Every other kind of doughnut is abhorrent to me.)

Also, a confession: I really like American Dad! — more than Family Guy (which, in spite of its initial brilliance, has become stale, mean-spirited and repetitive, possibly as a consequence of its dodgy aesthetic position as, simultaneously, an earnest lessons-learned sitcom and a crudely self-referential meta-sitcom) and definitely more than The Cleveland Show (which is just fucking terrrible, and everyone knows it.) Unlike either of the other shows in Seth MacFarlane’s animation empire, American Dad! (the exclamation point is an official part of the name; I’m so sorry…) consists of characters who seem, if not human, at least human-ish — not one-note caricatures like Peter Griffin or Glen Quagmire, but rather 

Unlike Family Guy, with its cutaway gags and winks to the audience and highbrow/lowbrow metafictiveness, American Dad! is constitutionally prohibited from rupturing its own diegesis — it can never worm its way out of a tricky plot situation or moral conundrum by just throwing up its hands and saying “Hey, don’t worry about it, this is just a constructed pop-cultural artifact! These characters are just comic archetypes, not representations of humanity, so who cares what happens to them? It’s not like you were taking any of this seriously, right?” Because it doesn’t have recourse to this smug anti-narrative exit strategy, American Dad! is forced into being a more tightly-constructed sitcom, into taking its own world seriously, because it doesn’t have the privilege of looking at itself from a world outside its world. In the grand tradition of the Oulipo or Lars von Trier or even your average cell-phone photograph, we see that aesthetic constraints ultimately lead to a more rigorously constructed, self-sufficient artwork. Family Guy has no rules, and hence no internal architecture, whereas American Dad! — being both rule-bound and rule-bounded — has enough architecture to give context and meaning to its own zany absurdity. Because it’s a well-known fact of comedy theory and comedy practice that something isn’t funny unless it’s acting as a disruption of a pattern or an order. That’s why the archetype of the “straight man” is so effective. That’s why jokes save all their humor for the last sentence instead of spreading it throughout. And that’s why American Dad! is great — because it’s its own straight man, if you will.

mention Roger

Attention, readers of the Smoldering Screen:

Yes, I have a new pair of sunglasses!

Also, I would like to introduce an occasional new feature that I will be posting called Fragments (alternative title: Ephemera.) I am continually finding old scraps and stray bits of projects that I casually started but lost track of or couldn’t strike a beachhead for and for one reason or another abandoned. As I unearth these fragments — saved Tumblr drafts that cut off mid-sentence, sloppy jottings of French poetry in the edges of class-notes, obsessively-sketched Greco-African masks — I will post them on this blog, holding them forth, unguarded and unpolished, for the ridicule and derision of the world. It should be pretty fun!

No idea what the context (if there is one) for this photo is, other than than it comes from the Tumblr of Rian Johnson, director of Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and the upcoming Looper.

Anyways, I like this image, a lot. It looks like what you would expect to be a black-and-white photo miraculously transubstantiated into color. There’s something so melodramatically brittle in those matte hues and shades…

Why, yes, this is a photo of an aged Buster Keaton (in his trademark flattened pork pie) having a stare-down with Samuel Beckett (looking very Roger Sterling, I think), with a marked difference in paunch-region button tightness, one may observe.

Days of Heaven —- directed by Terrence Malick; released 1978 (I highly recommend the Criterion Collection edition) —- Days of Heaven is often lauded as the most beautiful movie ever made, with magic-hour cinematography that strokes your brain like a feather carried on a breeze. DP Néstor Almendros’s account of the shooting of the film — excerpted from his excellent career-spanning autobiography and included in the film’s Criterion booklet — provides great insight into the creative process that led to the film’s Eden-poised-on-the-brink-of-the-Fall look. But what most moves me about Days is its fusion of deeply philosophical subtext with the bluntly elemental struggles of its characters: questions of will, morality and fate are spoken in the same image-language as pangs of hunger and sighs of love…

La Dolce Vita —- directed by Federico Fellini; released 1960 (seen in the form of a newly-restored, absolutely pristine, Gucci-funded, marble-textured print as part of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival) —- This film is not about busty starlets frolicking in fountains, nor is it anything close to an ode to living the “sweet life” in ’60s Rome. Rather, it is a deeply moral work about a goodhearted man’s existential corruption and barely-suggested redemption under the onslaught of a predatory media culture, widespread religious charlatanism, vague and often paradoxical sexual mores and of course his own distinctly modern neuroses. That said, La Dolce Vita is a visceral delight, revealing in glossy black-and-white the historical layers of Rome as it cuts from set-piece to set-piece, and never losing its ear for satire, even as it shifts from high-flying romp to absurdist tragedy. An all-too-real dream…!

The Double Hour (La doppia ora) —- directed by Giuseppe Capotondi; released 2009 in Italy, 2011 in the U.S. —- For those who like their Italian psychodrama peppered with Lynchian forays into the noir-inflected dreamworld, The Double Hour is a delight. Filippo Timi (who played a young Mussolini in Vincere) is the dour security guard at a mysterious riches-filled mansion by day and a prolific frequenter of speed-dating events at night. There, he meets a wounded-seeming Eastern European beauty (with secrets of her own!) and the two seem to hit it off until things go drastically awry partway through the film. From there, it all takes a turn for the macabre and the elusive, as both characters try to piece together the strands of what happened and what they really feel. An intricate, devious little thriller.

Drive —- directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; released 2011 (seen twice: once with my pal walkingspanish, once with my “Writing about Film” class) —- Oh please, not another ‘style versus substance’ debate! That seemed to be the gist of much of the critical discourse on Drive, and frankly I don’t have much to add. Yes, the film looks really, really good. Yes, those synth-driven songs are a blast. Yes, the film attempts to sentimentalize/moralize violence. Yes, this is possibly evil. Yes, Ryan Gosling is handsome. Yes, Albert Brooks is menacing. Yes, Carey Mulligan isn’t given much to work with. What else is there to say? The film, from a director whose Bronson I much enjoy and admire, seems rather humorless/sexless/self-serious for something marketed as genre fare. That said, I do have a soft spot for the pre-credits opening car chase…

Eyes Wide Shut —- directed by Stanley Kubrick; released 1999 —- I wrote my first — and possibly favorite — post for my school’s film blog (HopkinsCinemAddicts) on the subject of this movie, Kubrick’s last and most mystical. You can read that post here, and I will almost certainly repost it in full here on The Smoldering Screen very soon. Basically, I argue that the film has a philosophical depth that far exceeds its ‘erotic thriller’ reputation; it constructs a dense symbolic vocabulary out of masks, rituals, thresholds, anterooms, even business transactions. (And I also tie in Borges, so now you have to read it…!)

Fat Girl (À ma sœur !) —- directed by Catherine Breillat; released 2001 —- After a democratic contest in which readers of my blog voted on which of three rented DVDs I should watch, Fat Girl was selected, duly watched, and digressively written about here. My “review” doesn’t address the film so much as proffer a half-ass theory of aesthetics, so, well, sorry for that.

The Future —- directed by Miranda July; released 2011 (there is a tapas place adjoining the lovely Charles Theater in Baltimore that lets you buy drinks and bring them into the theater; walkingspanish and I bought a pitcher of sangria, transferred it into plastic cups, and spent the movie getting progressively drunker) —- When hapless Jason (Hamish Linklater) — whose relationship with Sophie (July) is on the rocks — bemoans the “end” of their love and (more generally) of his life’s ambitions, an elderly acquaintance upbraids him, proclaiming that “you’re just in the middle of the beginning.” Beneath its hipstery fastidiousness, what The Future concerns itself with is quite literally the passage of time, and all of our poignantly futile attempts to control and conceptualize it. While I could’ve done with less of the talking cat, and more of a vision of Jason and Sophie as a couple (and not just curly-haired twins), I can’t help but respect the quiet dignity the film affords its often frustrating and frustrated characters.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo —- directed by David Fincher; released 2011 —- Though I haven’t read Stieg Larsson’s books, he appears to be a lesser artist than David Fincher. What makes me say this? It has to do with Dragon Tattoo’s basic disjointedness between content and form. Fincher brings his familiar visual fastidiousness and flair for pacing, but there is something shamefully banal and predictable about the story he has to work with. This is not a feminist polemic nor an indictment of systemic Swedish corruption; it’s a merely elegant thriller fashioned out of the most boilerplate of materials. Despite aggressively competent performances from Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, there is nothing that ignites the viewer’s imagination or makes him question himself.

Heartbeats (Les Amours imaginaires) —- directed by Xavier Dolan; released 2010 —- Two Québécois hipsters (one a gay guy, the other a straight girl) fall in love (although “limerence” would be more apt) with the same aloof-and-elusive Adonis (whose resemblance to Louis Garrel proves uncoincidental.) The ensuing triangle of acrimony is utterly trivial and rote (and this is no slight, really) but everything is filmed with such a high-melodramatic arsenal of Godardian filmic tools that I was swept away on the gusts of feverish lust and sublimated self-loathing. Also, it doesn’t hurt that I find Québécois French bizarrely mesmeric to listen to. Heartbeats is pure cinema with nothing added — whether that bothers you will determine whether you love or hate Dolan’s shtick…

Irma Vep —- directed by Olivier Assayas; released 1996 —- Maggie Cheung plays herself, a talented Honk Kong actress trying to remain professional on the set of a French adaptation of Louis Feuillade’s seminal silent serial Les Vampires, while those around her, from the film’s over-the-hill, pseudo-New-Wave-y director (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud himself) to a kindhearted (but a trifle insistent) costume designer, attempt to love her and use her (the two are often indistinguishable) to their own ends. Assayas’s masterful film is both biting satire and haunting elegy of the filmmaking process, often compared to Day for Night but altogether less sentimental than anything Truffaut could’ve dreamed up. The whole is capped by a tantalizing experimental montage of sorts…

Iron Man 2 —- directed by Jon Favreau; released 2010 (seen in about four half-hour increments, while stoned and depressed and lying in bed) —- This may sound like faint praise but it’s not meant that way: Iron Man 2 is mainly good in that it is not offensively bad. The average super-hero film marries barely-concealed merchandising intentions to a noxious conservatism and punctuates the whole with rote action sequences whose video-game aesthetic leaves nothing at stake. Zipping along on the strength of witty performances from Robert Downey, Jr., Mickey Rourke and especially Sam Rockwell (!), Iron Man 2 mostly avoids these pitfalls. In the story of Rourke’s vendetta against the Stark family, there is a current of genuine pathos and bitterness that feeds a true sense of danger for RDJ’s mechanized, yet decidedly human, übermensch.

Jackie Brown —- directed by Quentin Tarantino; released 1997 (seen as part of film class that I was TA’ing) —- The title character (a stewardess dipping her well-pedicured toes into the get-rich-and/or-dead-quick world of LA crime, played by blaxploitation star Pam Grier) manages the neat trick of incarnating Tarantino’s beloved genre tropes while subverting them in a feminist reinvisioning of the Eastwood-ian stoic gunslinger myth. As such, Jackie Brown can be seen as a distinctly ’90s, local instead of globalized, flat-out funny instead of sly prefigurement of Kill Bill’s Beatrix Kiddo. It goes without saying that Tarantino has assembled a rogues’ gallery of scheming players, counter-players, cops and bystanders, all of whom cozily inhabit the kinetic rhythms of that familiar dialogue. Lots of fun.

La jetée —- directed by Chris Marker; released 1962 (seen with my mom on Netflix) —- Two different masters goaded me towards La jetée. On the one hand there was Terry Gilliam, whose taut, ghoulish and often surreal 12 Monkeys was inspired (at least as far as plot is concerned) by Marker’s experiment in photo-montage. On the other hand there was the discipline of film studies, embodied by professors who ceaselessly returned to academic discussions of time, movement and the nature of the cinematic image in La jetée’s half-hour causal loop. As it turns out, neither goad quite meets or is met by the actual film: questions of plot are only relevant in the loosest sense and, however much film theory there is in the film, formal questions are just the vessels for raw, untheorized pathos.

Kaboom —- directed by Gregg Araki; released 2010 —- Those who approach Kaboom as a pseudo-anthropologic or even satirico-anthropologic portrait of the sexual mores of today’s youth are committing the tired fallacy — now feverishly exercised in the service (or disservice) of Lena Dunham’s Girls — of assuming that any depiction of youth is directly piped in from the real world. But Kaboom does not take place in the real world: it creates, out of naked skin and kaleidoscopic costuming, a wish-fulfillment world in which sexual release and metaphysical temblor are two sides of the same young, cheeky, studiously-coiffed, wittily apocalyptic coin (which coin happens to be engraved with the cherubically libidinous face of Juno Temple herself…)