God is an Alien?

God Told Me to (1975) - Cohen

Larry Cohen (The Black Caesar, It's Alive!) directs this gritty, low budget cop procedural/Sci-fi that plays out like a good X-Files episode. It starts with a young maniac with a rifle on the top of the water tower in New York, plucking off unsuspecting pedestrians. When a tough NY cop Peter Nicolas (Tony Lo Bianco), catches up with him, the young man tells him that god told him to do it before jumping off to his death. After series of mass murders, with all perpetrators having some connections with a long haired androgynous young man, religious Peter finds himself deep in the rabbit hole involving alien abductions, virgin births and his unknown past.
 

The civic unrest ensues after Peter drops the bomb to the press about the perpetrators' famous words. But the film doesn't let its religious implications bog down from going forward. It is very much a self-contained NY movie too. All the verité style location shooting is brimming with raw energy that equals Dog Day Afternoon. Many of the recognizable NY b-movie actors also make appearances. The film is truly bizarre in every aspect and earns a place in my collection as one of the classics.

Back Again

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) - Jackson

First off, I couldn't find the picture of massive amount of 35mm film cans that contained one release print of the Hobbit. I really wanted to post that instead of the one above. 48 fps- the way of the future eh Jackson? So I put on my 3D glasses expecting to be passively entertained for 3 hours. The way of the future my ass, The Hobbit looks like a Masterpiece Theater from the 80s. I don't know what the big hoopla's about. Ten years ago, video technology was all about emulating that 'film look'. Now Jackson wants to go back to TV soap quality of yesteryears? Thanks to familiar themes and music and likable Martin Freeman as Bilbo, I somewhat settled down watching that irritating imagery. Then it turns out The Hobbit follows the exactly the same path of The Fellowship of the Ring: Leaving home, a big battle underground somewhere, that nasty golum and acceptance in being tiny. It was fresh ten years ago. The magic is gone. Ethereal virginal babe is gone. Boromir gone. Too much musty manliness. I nodded off couple times somewhere in between. Too fucking long. Two more of this in the works? Really? No thanks. I'll probably be dragged into seeing the other two come Christmas time, I'm sure.

Top 20 Discoveries 2012

These are the choice cuts from the films I've seen in 2012 in no particular order

*click on the titles for full reviews
City of Pirates (1983) - Ruiz

My first introduction to Raul Ruiz. Surrealistic and scatterbrained. Can't quite get my grip on him. Or you are not supposed to. I gave in to strange stories and visuals with my second Ruiz film 'Three Cowns and a Sailor'. But at the end it's City of Pirates which stuck with me more. More Ruiz please!

Poetry (2010) - Lee

Poetry is nothing like what I expected. High melodrama for sure, but it's understated and not afraid of reflecting life's nitty-gritty, ugly, awkward details. Much thanks to Yun Jeong-hie's performance as a sixty five year old woman trying to write poetry for the first time while struggling with whatever life throws at her, everything feels real and honest.

In Vanda's Room (2000) - Costa

and
Colossal Youth (2006) - Costa

As far as immersive film experiences blurring fiction and documentary are concerned, there is no other filmmaker than Pedro Costa I can think of. Costa's films remind me that there are still so much beauty left in the world, even in the worst circumstances.

Tren de Sombras (1997) - Guerin

It's Guerin's masterful use of 'cinema as an investigative tool' that I admire so much. Playful and just plain gorgeous, much more so here than his better known In the City of Silvia.

Sing a Song of Sex (1967) - Oshima

It must've been something to be part of Japanese New Wave in the 60s. Must've been a wild and crazy time to live in! Audacious, pointy and uncompromising, Sing a Song of Sex stands out even among the best JNW films.

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) - Bresson

Doesn't matter if it's a parable about Jesus. It's just a hauntingly beautiful film. Wiazemsky's sorrowful face is unforgettable.

Nouvelle Vague (1990) - Godard

Perhaps the most beautiful of all Godard films and also most romantic.

Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) - Wakamatsu

Another masterpiece of Japanese New Wave. Perversely tragic or tragically perverse- take your pick.


Remorques (1941) - Gremillon
Gremillon's film is vastly different from its Hollywood counterpart in its day. I was surprised by its subtle writing and artistry. And Jean Gabin is the man.

Nostalghia (1983) - Tarkovsky

As he demonstrates time and time again, Tarkovsky's faith in humanity is demonstrated in a spectacular manner.

L'important c'est d'aimer (1975) - Zulawski

Romy Schneider gives it all in another one of Zulawski's emotional fireworks display.

Gespenster (2005) - Petzold

Perhaps the most haunting film by Petzold I've seen so far.

Our Beloved Month of August (2008) - Gomes

Whether it came about by accident or chance, I couldn't help falling for Miguel Gomes's loose, playful filmmaking.

The Red Shoes (1948) - Powell & Pressburger


Black Narcissus (1947) - Powell & Pressburger

Underneath the whole technical mastery, there is something very perverse about Powell & Pressburger films that rivals Hitchcock. But their films are much more refined, artistic and beautiful to look at.

Jai été au Bal (1989) - Blank

and
Dry Wood (1973) - Blank

I was delighted to have found Les Blank's music and booze filled Americana.

Le Pont des Arts (2004) - Green

Austere, sincere, bitter, funny, touching... and many more adjectives can be applied to Eugene Green's contemplation of power of art. Natasha Régnier shines as a classical singer.

Les Chanson d'Amour (2007) - Honoré

This is the film that made me reconsider watching musicals. Christophe Honoré appropriates the old into something that reflects modern world. And the result is this beautiful, touching ensemble piece.

Dustin's Top 10 Films released in 2012

Friedkin's Southern Fried Chicken

Killer Joe (2011) - Friedkin

This is one nasty film. Impeccably dressed (in black), always professional Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a Dallas policeman who dabbles in contract killing on the side. He gets approached by a degenerate hick family to kill the ex-wife/mom for the life insurance money. But after finding out these lunkheads don't even have the advances to pay him, Joe almost walks out on them, until he sees Dottie (Juno Temple), a sweet, virginal daughter of the family, twirling around under the bright Texas sky. Creepy and scary, McConaughy is a revelation here: with his chiseled face and tall frame, he dominates the claustrophobic surroundings (half of the film takes place inside a trailer). Friedkin adapts Tracy Lett's unabashedly pulpy stage play with extreme economical precision. There is no fat to be found anywhere. And it's really funny. It plays out like an early Coen brothers film but has that extra jolt of Southern sleaze. Killer Joe fully embraces its typical white trash stereotypes and is not afraid of pushing buttons - many would find that 'fried drumstick scene' too distasteful and disturbing. But I have to say it's hugely entertaining. Like in Bug, Friedkin's previous stage adaptation, the veteran director seems to have found his calling in making a small-budget, tight psychological noir that provides actors space to exercise their craft.

Global Lens at MoMA

Global Film Initiative (GFI) and MoMA present Global Lens 2013: 10 films from developing film communities as diverse as Kazakhstan and Chile, in a traveling exhibition. From January 10th - 25th, the program holds up shop in NYC, where many of the titles are making their North American or New York premieres.

To celebrate the 10th year, Global Lens starts with a week-long run of Zhang Yuan's Beijing Flickers and Eduardo Nunes's Southwest; an overlooked earlier film, Life Kills Me (2007), from Chilean director Sebastián Silva (whose 2009 film The Maid was much admired); Cairo 678, a big hit at MoMA's 2011 New Directors/New Films festival, and much more. I am just stupefied by the caliber of these films. I just wish I had more time to watch all ten.


MODEST RECEPTION (Iran)

Two city slickers, Gaveh (director Mani Haghighi) and Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti) decked with plastic bags full of money and an iphone in their luxury foreign car, set out to distribute the money in an impoverished, mountainous border area. With each poor inhabitant they meet, a new Faustian condition is devised for their handouts: They make one brother swear on the Qu'ran that he won't share his money with the other brother; posing as a vet, they throw money at a man who's about to put down his injured mule not to do it; they try to buy off a dead infant from a grieving father digging a grave, and so on. Their subjects are mostly simple, honest folks who are tested by the protagonists to sell out. But as their sardonic games play out, it's their moral ambiguity that is put to the test. This fable-like nature of the film is still very much based on reality. Biting and thought provoking, Modest Reception is another great film from Iran.



CAIRO 678 (Egypt)

Based on real life incidents, Cairo 678 delicately interweaves the lives of three Egyptian women from different social standings, all victims of endemic sexual harassment. The film highlights the culture of shaming victims in a male dominant society. The film was accused of 'inciting violence against men and their genitalia with sharp objects'. It not only succeeds in making a point, but showing a glimpse of a rapidly changing Muslim society as well, with the help of superb performances by its leads (Bosra, Nelly Karim and Nahed El Sebai).



SOUTHWEST (Brazil)

Its audacious 3.66:1 ratio b&w photography accentuates the beauty of this fairy tale steeped in that unmistakable Latin American magical realism tradition. Sudoeste is quite the opposite of recent Cinema Novo, exemplified by City of God and Elite Squad.

Clarice, a girl who bears her dead mother's name gets to live the life she never got a chance to, all in one day, from childhood to old age. Every frame is exquisitely composed. Majestic horizontal space boxes in the viewer's perception, creating a fantastic netherworld. Lyrical and dreamlike, Southwest needs to be seen on the big screen.



SHYAMAL UNCLE TURNS OFF THE LIGHTS (India)

The film tells a simple story of a frugal elderly pensioner's sprawling quest through the Kafkaesque Indian bureaucratic system to turn off the street lights during daytime, because he deems it wasteful. Shyamal Uncle is at once a neorealist tour of a bustling urban Indian jungle and a delightful observational comedy that offers lots of laughs and charms.

Global Lens runs Jan. 10 through 25. Please visit MoMA website for tickets and times.

Metamorphose into Mediocrity

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (2012) - The Quays

I understand embracing video technology by artists have strong visual aesthetics. It's cheaper, easier, less time consuming, etc. For me, Lynch's Inland Empire was a major disappointment. His strong suit has always been painstakingly planned mise-en-scene and breathtakingly beautiful cinematography. Even more visual emphasis should be put on when we talk about the world of The Brothers Quay. Obviously, beauty of the Quay films had almost entirely relied upon the intricacy in their stop-motion animation trained craft. After their stint with a DSLR camera last year with On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets. And this time, they are taking on Kafka's The Metamorphosis. One would think this is a perfect marriage. And what a missed opportunity it is- minimal effort, muddy images, lazy realization, this version of Metamorphosis looks like a half-assed High School video project. But it's KAFKA! Even if it was just a commissioned easy money project, how can they justify the quality of this dreadful work?  How can a conscientious artist not look at their work objectively, side by side, with something marvelous like Streets of Crocodiles and say wow, this is unacceptable!

Only saving grace of this screening was music of Leoš Janáček live accompaniment by pianist Mikhail Rudy. But what a major disappointment!

Apocalypse in Real Time

Turin Horse (2012) - Tarr




Set in a barren landscape in an unrelenting windstorm, Turin Horse follows the daily routine of a bearded man and his daughter in almost real time (or at least it feels like one): they get up- the woman first, who puts on layers upon layers of clothes, then helps her father who seems suffered a stroke (his right arm is limp) get dressed, walks through the gale to get water from the well outside the house, boils a couple of potatoes, then they proceed to eat, then stare out the window or the lamp for hours on end then go to sleep. Repeat. Again. Again. Their mangy horse refuses to work or eat. Then their well dries out over night. They have to move, so they pack, leave with the horse in tow, then come back, probably because of the horse wouldn't budge, or there isn't anywhere left to go. Then the oil lamp wouldn't light even though it's full. What does all this mean?

What is said to be Bela Tarr's last film, Turin Horse is a bleak vision of apocalypse. The preface of the film explains Nietzsche's breakdown and decline after seeing a horse being thrashed and throwing his arms around the beast and sobbing. The Beast of Burden. Very Biblegorical. Very Bresson.

The old man's neighbor visits him, informing the town in ruins- 'the wind swept it away. And there is no god or gods, therefore we don't exist either'. A band of marauding gypsies visit them for water, only to be shooed away. With his typical long takes and sparse dialog, Tarr paints humanity's end in grim silence. But I feel that its glacial pace and two and a half hour running time are not really warranted, for there is less visual poetry here.

Michel Houellecq on Haneke et al

 

Just finished reading Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq. Loved it. I've read his Elementary Particles some time ago. It really repulsed me at the time. Now I think his observations in human behavior, however painful they are, are very truthful. I just wanted to share with you guys about what the main character says about Haneke. I thought it was funny and biting:

I had decided at that particular time to remain in Madrid all week, and two days later I had a little argument with Esther on the subject of Ken Park, the latest film by Larry Clark, which she had been keen to go and see. I had hated Kids, and I hated Ken Park even more, the scene where this dirty little shit beats up his grandparents was particularly unbearable. That filmmaker completely disgusted me, and it was no doubt this sincere disgust that made me incapable of stopping myself from talking about it, while I strongly suspected that Esther liked him out of habit and conformism, because it was generally cool to approve of the representation of violence in the arts, and that she liked him without any real discernment, in the same way she liked, for example, Michael Haneke, without even realizing that the meaning of those sorrowful and moral films by Michael Haneke was completely different from that of those by Larry Clark. I knew that it would have been better for me to keep quiet, that abandoning my usual comic character could only bring me trouble, but I couldn't, the imp of the perverse was the stronger. We were in a bizarre, very kitsch bar, with mirrors and gold fixtures, full of paroxysmal homosexuals who buggered themselves silly in adjacent backrooms, yet which was open to everyone, with groups of young boys and girls calmly drinking Coca-Colas at neighboring tables. I explained to her while rapidly downing my iced tequila that I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West's absurd attraction to assert that among all the merchants of evil, Larry Clark was one of the most common, most vulgar, simply because he unreservedly took the side of the young against the old, because all his films were an incitement to children to treat their parents without the least humanity, the least pity, and that there was nothing new or original about this, it had been the same in all the cultural sectors for the last fifty-odd years, and this supposedly cultural tendency in fact only hid the desire for a return to a primitive state where the young got rid of the old without ceremony, with no questions asked, simply because they were too weak to defend themselves. It was, therefore, just a brutal for any civilization could judge itself on the fate it reserved for the weakest, for those who were no longer either productive or desirable, in short Larry Clark and his abject accomplice Harmony Korine were just two of the most tedious-and artistically the most miserable- examples of the Nietzschean scum who had been proliferating in the cultural field for far too long, and who could in no way be put on the same level as people like Michael Haneke, or like me, for example- who had always made sure to introduce a certain element of doubt, uncertainty, and unease into my shows, even if they were (I was the first to admit it) otherwise repugnant.

*Just to give you a little bit of background info. The main character Daniel in the book, has made career out of being the most cynical, racist, sexist, any number of negative -ist comic persona. He realizes, at this juncture of the book, that he is aging and there is no turning back (he is in his 50s). Even though he is banging a 22 yr old girlfriend, Esther, who gives him the greatest physical pleasure he ever experienced in life, he gradually learns that the young generation doesn't seem to be aware of the concept of 'love' or 'compassion'.

Daniel is in many ways a despicable character. What I like about Houellebecq is that once in a while, asserts certain truth he believes in through his protagonist and doesn't try to hide it. And I tend to agree with him.

Billyoh

I Know Where I'm Going (2009) - Rivers




A scientist narrates about the significance of human existence on the earth as we separately follow three eclectic, troll-like men living out of the grid (one of them is Jake Williams, the sole subject in Two Years at Sea). What would remain of our actions or traces a hundred million years from now? Are we leaving an indelible mark on the earth to be remembered? When the earth recycles itself and brings out what's been buried above ground again, would someone find our intact fossilized city? Probably not.

Another lovely short (30 minutes) musings on human existence by Rivers in the backdrop of Scottish Highlands, shot in grainy anamorphic 16mm. His color stuff is even lovelier. Can't get enough of Ben Rivers. I'm hooked!

Two Years at Sea Review

Some nice person put this on youtube in its entirety as I just found out:

 

Torpedoed Heart

Submarine (2010) - Ayoade




One of the many reasons I don't like Wes Anderson movies is that his protagonists, regardless of their age, are arrogant pricks. They all represent selfish, cocky twenty somethings in a child/older man's body that even their mother would find disturbing. Maybe it is my disgust with the recent viewing of Anderson movie that hindered/alleviated watching this film but I was very taken by it.

Craig Roberts plays a Wales High Schooler, Oliver Tate, who forever wears a my-dog-just-got-run-over-by-a-train-in-front-of-me expression (I wonder if Aoyade based Oliver directly off of Bud Cort in Harold and Maude). The film trails Oliver's trials and tribulations in saving his parents' marriage and being the best boyfriend (to Jordana, played by Yasmin Paige) in the world. Jordana is a type of a girl who'd light your leg hair on fire for fun and return all your book recommendations unread. But Oliver's still enamored by her.

I didn't mind Ayoade's somber visual quirks as it didn't interfere with the story. The location and softly dark photography adds to the film's melancholy mood. Oliver's not so perfect parents (played wonderfully by Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins) are all too human, their imperfections and awkwardness in full display. Paddy Considine shows up in his trumped up Kajagoogoo-do as a new age/martial arts guru, testing the Tate marriage. He made me laugh so hard every time. I also liked the film confronting life's awkward moments, not skimming over or attributing them to some character defects. Being adolescent does/did feel like you are under the lukewarm bath water. And no, you don't feel like you've figured everything out when you are 38.

Dustin's Top 10 Films 2012

A serious year 2012 in cinema it was: the global economical downturn churned out some of the most exciting films, especially in Europe where filmmakers seem to be reflecting on the collective state of identity crisis. On the other side of the pond, other than Paul Thomas Anderson's Master, there was no real grand experiment to be found. Quieter still, and curiously so, was the Asian cinema which lacked both substance and form.

Earlier in the year, my personal exploration took me to documentaries of Les Blank, silent gems, Powell & Pressburger, Japanese New Wave, more Godard, Portuguese Cinema, Raul Ruiz, Christian Petzold and Berliner Schule, Jose Luis Guerin and made me revisit Tarkovsky, Chytilova and Chris Marker. And what started out as a simple question if there was an adequate name to describe the current crop of shape-shifting postmodern cinema pulled me into the very depth of the cinematic rabbit hole, left me exhausted and confused and exhilarated at the same time. As I was reminded watching Film Socialisme, Sans Soleil, Fontainhas Trilogy, Tren de Sombras, Tabu, A Man Vanishes and Two Years at Sea that I am just scratching the surface of this great artistic medium. At the same time, I feel glad and relieved that there are so much more to explore.

Please Click on the titles for full reviews

1. Holy Motors - Carax


My interview with Leos Carax

2. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia - Ceylan


3. Amour - Haneke


My interview with Michael Haneke

4. Goodbye First Love - Hansen-Løve


My interview with Mia Hansen-Løve

5. Cosmopolis - Cronenberg


6. Two Years at Sea - Rivers


7. Barbara - Petzold


My interview with Christian Petzold

8. Tabu - Gomes


My interview with Miguel Gomes

9. The Master - Anderson


10. Faust - Sokurov


And others:

The Kid with a Bike - Dardenne
Wuthering Heights - Arnold
Skyfall - Mendes
Leviathan - Castraing Taylor, Paravel
This is Not a Film - Panahi
Oslo, August 31st - Trier
Dredd - Travis
I Wish - Koreeda
Almayer's Folly - Akerman
Found Memories - Murat