Gamer (Neveldine/Taylor, 2009)

After having seen Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (my first film from the duo) and garnered some interest in Neveldine/Taylor, seeing the Gamer Blu-Ray for $1.99 at a out-of-business Blockbuster I couldn't resist. With Ghost Rider, a pure franchise vehicle not written by the duo, the filmmaker were clearly restricted. Ghost Rider had its moments of anarchy and insanity yet it was nothing on the level of Gamer. A completely no-holds-barred ridiculous accumulation of half-second shots and insane CGI. And no matter how tongue-in-cheek it is, it also is an outrageous satire of the Internet/Virtual/Gaming worlds. The opening of the film completely sets up the pace: a series of shots that no person could follow, at least not without getting down to frame-by-frame inspection. The shots are so chaotic and edited so quickly that your brain assumes the series of events actually makes sense yet this most likely isn't the case. I'm sure there is no continuity and no sense of cause-and-effect editing. Some of the editing/pace/anti-compositions are almost Mekas/Brakhage like.

From MUBI:

"There are a lot of people out there making "serious" movies that can't direct actors half as well as Neveldine and Taylor can, and people who try for "artful" that couldn't pull of the chiaroscuro of the mansion scene, which puts more or less everyone who's ever cited Jacques Tourneur as an influence to shame. That the scene transforms, over the course of a few minutes, into a song-and-dance number and then a fight (but of course the musical is the ancestor of the action movie), then a bit of sci-fi special effects and finally a confrontation on a basketball court, is just further proof of their impatient genius, which is really indistinguishable from idiocy."
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The song-and-dance routine mentioned above is nothing short of amazing.

Putty Hill (Matthew Porterfield, 2010)

One of the most important American films of 2010. We swift through conversations of different people who knew Cory, a 24 year old dead from an unexpected overdose. The conversations paint a beautiful mosaic of this troubled community in Baltimore. In the process Porterfield also crafts a brilliant exploration of fiction and documentaries. How these different mediums engage and interact with audiences. The ending is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful endings of contemporary American cinema.

As a part of my "Avant-Garde Glimpses in Narrative Cinema" series I posted still from the ending here: trashaesthetics.wordpress.com/AGGINC/puttyhill

The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011)

A film so embedded in politics that one would think it was a political film. Even with its stars and the fact that it is directed by one of the major figures in Hollywood, I still thought it would attempt to explore some of the darker sides of the political sphere; especially considering Clooney's 'political activism' (which recently landed him in jail). Somehow, though, the film completely eludes any sort of political statement becoming a melodrama centered around an affair (a melodrama about an affair? that sounds original!). Not only does the film fail to achieve any sort of political resonance but it also employs terrible pace (no one I watched it with was "entertained" by any means) and directing that seems straight out of a Directing 101 book. The only scene that seems to have any sort of distinct directorial style is the crucial scene when Gosling's character meets with Hoffman's character to discuss some key events that will guide much of the film's plot. Transformed into silhouettes unto an American flag, the scene works as a visual metaphor where these black, mysterious, soulless creatures are the ones running America.

films, keywords

Random notes on Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife

I found these notes for the Aviator's Wife I must've written a couple years ago while watching.

Future

Been in the planning phases of two video works for the last couple of weeks.

One will be a sort of avant-garde doc or contemplation on Brenez and her current work on what she has termed Internationalist Cinema. Inspired by reading about this with Brenez's recent visit to NYC. It's not going to be a feature length of any means, just almost an explanatory, visually experimental video about these filmmakers, Brenez and Internationalist Cinema. I have vague ideas and images in my head, yet nothing as concrete as the next one.

Inspired after reading "Images of Images" chapter in Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema. Particularly the digression Ruiz gets into about an imagined utilitarian society that only allows one painting to be painted by all painters and the outcome of three very different painters there. The whole chapter is trying to prove how a copy can be just as interesting, original, different, artistic, etc than the real thing. I have a very specific idea about a segment of this film and it will be someone positioned among different monitors and cameras where at the same time you can see different angles of the same action on screen. More ideas but don't want to give away too much.

Hopefully I will get some time and be able to start working on these. Will be updating as things progress.

http://strugglingon2fronts.com

ps: two completely unrelated but incredible David Cronenberg posts through Criterion:

An incredible 1.5 hour interview with the man himself at the Museum of the Moving Image (sound)

Notes from A Videodrome test screening (images)

Visual Poems in Gance's J'accuse

Watching films like this one truly feels as if sound really did take something away from the cinema. Out of the endless technical and visual feats accomplished in the film, Gance's visual poems still seem like quite a bold, brilliant and purely cinematic choice. When the main protagonist and poet Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé) is about to tell one of his poems to his mother, a cut that is expected to lead to an intertitle of the actual poem actually leads to a series of beautifully composed shots that evoke a poem. A visual equivalent to written poetry. By doing this Gance is equating the cinema (an art that, especially in 1919, no one took seriously, it wasn't even really considered an art back then) with poetry (perhaps the most esteemed of the arts).

Jean begins to recite Ode to the Sun to this mother:

followed by:

There's a few of these throughout the film. Completely stunning. Watched this in anticipation of Napoleon on April 1.