Month: March 2005

horror conventions and culture

in a comment over in the “the wicker man/spirited away” thread mark posted some interesting stuff about more “amoral” japanese horror vs. the christian ethic of the average american horror film. i think this might deserve its own thread and so am cutting and pasting the relevant portion of mark’s comments here.

What I did discover that interested me was the lack of morals of the spirits and whom they choose to reward and punish. This didn’t come up much in Spirited Away – for example the girl’s parents are turned into pigs not out of some god’s whim, but b/c they dared to eat food that belonged to someone else. They “sinned.” In the Japanese ghost story books I read, it seemed punishments were meted out for no good reason; that the spirits were simply mischievous, weren’t judging based on sin, and in some cases couldn’t even be classified as “thinking” (which reminded me of the Cthuhlu mythos, where the malevolence is pure, and the monsters aren’t even really capable of rational thought.)
Continue reading horror conventions and culture

The Wicker Man / Spirited Away

Just watched The Wicker Man and Spirited Away by Miyazaki

Several here would have a field day using Wicker Man as text: Comparative religion, worker exploitation through religion, cultural imperialism, and as a great example of the post-hippie New Age rise in paganism and anti-authority to which the time period (early 70s) gave rise.

One of my favorite scenes in the film shows the police officer, a devout Christian, watching in horror as a teacher instructs a group of children about pagan rites. This fascinates me in light of the current Darwinism / creationism debate going on in red states school boards across the country. I would imagine either side could identify with both the teacher and the officer; the pure outrage of teaching young people something so clearly erroneous and idiotic as creationism…or Darwinism.
Continue reading The Wicker Man / Spirited Away

Yes Men

God, I wanted to love this film. Two pranksters take on the WTO, getting invited to conferences to present (as reps of world trade) on globalization in some wonderfully twisted provocations. The actual pranks are quite good–a speech lamenting the Civil War in America, for instance, because normal market forces would have eventually and more peacefully evolved from unpaid labor (shipped to a new country) into efficiently-paid labor forces kept in their own cheap homes/countries (while the corporations run the forces from afar).

Three solid speeches/pranks, and lots and lots of filler. The pranksters hang out and talk, inanely, about how they’re prepping the prank. We see them sleep, or shop for the right suit. I was so sad to see such lousy, sloppy filmmaking for a subject–and a mode of satiric intervention–I find so important.

1. Back to documentaries–here’s a good example of a bad one.

2. And they remind you why Michael Moore is actually one hell of a talent. His ability to shape agit-prop narrative, to entertain as he attacks…. I wish I could recommend “The Yes Men,” but you’d be much better revisiting Moore’s tv show “The Awful Truth.”

Speaking of tripe

I gave “The Transporter” a shot, after my brother weighed in on how amazing it was. It wasn’t. I would call it, if you will, the flip-side to “Goodbye Dragon Inn.” A lot happens in this film, but you don’t care, whereas in that film, as I understand it, nothing happens, and you don’t care.

Maybe that reveals something about pure cinema–the purest product provokes the most sincere and deeply existential apathy.

hollywood shuffle

not much high art of late i’m afraid. we watched “shrek 2” a few nights ago and last night we watched “friday night lights”. “shrek 2” is entertaining enough–jennifer saunders and rupert everett are great, as are eddie murphy (of course) and antonio banderas. i find it funny that even in animation voiceover the black guy still plays the sidekick. but there’s not much else to say about this. don’t do what i did and watch “faraway idol” with simon cowell on the dvd extras.

we thought “friday night lights” was really quite good. it is a genre film through and through, and towards the end the conventions take over to a large extent but it is fairly affecting stuff–much closer to “hoop dreams” than to something like “varsity blues”. there’s some weird stuff with race towards the end and in general the film skips over dealing with the question of race in a small texas town in the late 80s but still worth a watch. the dvd extra interviews with the actual now grown-up players (this is very closely based on real events, or rather a non-fiction book about real events) are quite moving in parts, as you see what became of the guy who when the movie starts out seems destined for nfl stardom.

Does anyone still watch TV?

Someone here said that Lost is good. And I suppose that there might just be a chance that there is a good hour-long thriller out there, but I didn’t want to waste the hour to take a chance on Lost; the odds were very much against it because TV SUCKS.

The networks and cable; comedies, dramas, reality shows; game shows, talk shows, sports; those purveyors of our horrors that are MTV, E!, BET, A&E… I honestly have given up on something good showing up on TV. Am I wrong? I might be, but I can’t stand to do more than flip channels for an hour each night. Continue reading Does anyone still watch TV?

Mabuse — insert “abuse” joke, preferably prefixed by “self-“, here

I’d heard much about this — Fritz Lang’s 1933 updating of an old serial, adapted from a novel about a criminal mastermind. The film uses its lovingly-reiterated generic conventions to take potshots at the Nazis, then ascendant in Germany.

I won’t say much about all this significance–I watched the Criterion disc, which comes with all of these important extras which someday, maybe, when terribly bored or in prep for a poorly-thought-through decision to teach this film, I need more background. Political allegory, censored film, genre/pop film as subversion, etc.

But I will recommend it on the merits. Despite (because of?) its antiquated plot techniques, there’s this dazzling melodramatic aesthetic: Continue reading Mabuse — insert “abuse” joke, preferably prefixed by “self-“, here

Jerry Lewis

Just a heads up: Jerry’s solo films are now available on DVD. I recommend the following film be added to your Netflix cue ASAP (I insist you update your cue as well, because “The Incredibles” and “Sex and the City, Season 6, Vol. 2” will just have to wait for this one):

“The Ladies Man” (1961). This film is ahead of its time. Much of the film is shot on a set so large that it took up two Paramount sound stages. Built by Lewis at a cost of $500,000 (ridiculous at the time), the cutaway set of a four-story mansion allowed the camera to roam in and out, up and down, without cutting. Jean-Luc Godard had this film in mind when he shot “Tout Va Bien.” Wes Anderson must have had “The Ladies Man” in mind as well, because some of the scenes on the Belafonte are shot in the same way.

Overall, Lewis’s films are pretty dated–they seem to please only the most hardcore of fans. But this film is really stunning. The story is this: a college grad, swearing off women for the rest of his life, unwittingly takes a job as a houseboy in an all-girl boarding home. It has no plot, really. Basically, it’s a masterful stringing-together of choreography, cinematography, and gags. Not his funniest, but it’s probably the most visually impressive film he ever made.

Truth is stranger than fiction

Or: truth is no stranger to fiction. Hey, could we talk about documentaries? The College has a Film Club, and I’m the acting advisor. One of the things the Club’s president has asked me to do is recommend films for the Club to screen. I noticed that none of the films the Club has screened in the recent past are non-narrative or experimental. So I suggested they put together a documentary film series. I don’t know if they’ll run with this idea, but I am hoping they’ll have an official screening of at least one documentary in the near future. I told them a nice start would be the Maysles’s “Salesman”–which I think is a classic. It’s as painful, funny, and intriguing as “Glengarry Glen Ross” or “Death of a Salesman.” Any other suggestions? Doesn’t matter if it’s obscure or marginal, just as long as it’s available. By the way, does anyone know if Errol Morris’s “Gates of Heaven” is available in any format? And why hasn’t there been more talk about experiemtnal or non-narrative films on this blog? J’accuse!

Iranian Cinema

I’m pretty ignorant about Iranian cinema, but I watched Abbos Kiarostami’s Ten last night and thought it was damn good. J. Hoberman tells me it “questions the notion of film as narrative,” describing Ten as “conceptually rigorous, splendidly economical, and radically Bazinian.” That may very well be the critical kiss of death, but I was very much engaged by this complex glimpse of contemporary Iran. Are there other Iranian films out there I should see?