sickpeople

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA

For posterity: Fox seems to have given up on tonight and assumed that the Academy Awards are going to win the ratings game tonight. So guess what they're running against Hollywood's celebration of the virtues of cinema?

Independence Day. God bless.

Tae Kwon Do is for faggots

Spin Kick is a stupid, shitty movie; anyone who tells you differently is just trying to show themselves off as a jet-setting cinecoteur enthusiast who’ll tell you his top-ten-list of all the good Korean movies made before Better Luck Tomorrow regardless of whether you want to hear it or not. I know that I’ve got a bad habit of finding meaning in shitty, stupid movies, but this isn’t one of those cases – a cigar isn’t necessarily a marital aid, y’know. I’ll gladly admit that I had a fine time watching Spin Kick, of course, but when I keep comparing a movie to BASEketball and finding that it comes up short in a lot of ways, it won’t do anyone any favors to pretend we’re dealing with quality here.

Of course, I did watch it all the way to the end, and there were a bunch of times when I was duly impressed, and there were even a couple of moments when I can unashamedly say that Spin Kick totally got me. The story behind the movie (rag-tag assemblage of Sporting Misfits has to come together for the sake of Team and Institution) is older than dirt; structurally, the only difference between Spin Kick and Major League is that the former is about Tae Kwon Do instead of baseball. What’s interesting, and I’m completely willing to accept that this is the kind of thing that’s only interesting to me, is that I was able to understand Spin Kick at all. Going into the film I knew as much about Tae Kwon Do as I knew about baseketball going into, well, BASEketball, and there was never a time when I felt like the drama of the film had gone over my head.

We in the Western world (or Western-influenced world, which in terms of culture studies is pretty much the same thing) have kind of a skewed perspective on how movies like this work. Major League, for instance, works for us because the drama gets played out in terms of baseball – can Charlie Sheen summon enough character to strike this guy out? can Wesley Snipes actually back up all his shit-talking? can a team be so totally repulsed by a woman that they’re actually motivated to win? Movies like this work because we’re all so inured to the institution of baseball by this point that we don’t even have to try to see how character comes out in the actions of the game –we’ve even got a parallel news industry at least partially devoted to explaining how this happens. More importantly, however, we can safely assume this understanding isn’t privileged information. If they partake inAmerica’s Pastime in Communist Cuba, it’s safe to say that the cat’s out of the bag.

But imagine if you’d never heard of baseball – or better yet, that you’d heard of it, but had no understanding of how it worked. It’s a pretty safe bet to say that you’d have a prohibitively harder time unlocking the mysteries of Major League. And yet this is never a problem with Spin Kick, in spite of the fact that the movie plays heavily off of how Tae Kwon Do works as both an institution and a sport. Of course the movie left me serially befuddled – I must have thought the movie was over about three times before it was actually over – but I never felt oblivious to what was going on in the film; I could always tell when the characters were stepping up and when they were getting totally crushed, and I was generally able to fill in most of the emotional blanks in between.

I think Korea may be the most interesting place on this earth about whose culture I know absolutely nothing. I mean, I know they’re a gigantic economy and that they’re way ahead of the curve technologically (I seem to recall someone telling me that South Korea has more per-capita high-speed internet connections than anywhere else in the world, although I’m far too lazy to google that fact for backup), but I can understand facts like that only in an American (or “global”, if you’d rather) context; if you asked for my opinion on the state of affairs for the lower-class Korean woman, I’d be only slightly more helpful than your average Godsmack fan. As a result, I find South Korean movies fascinating because, well, I find them fascinating, even though I can’t make a single claim as to why I should know what’s going on. Either these movies are just flat-out well-done or my psychosis isn’t funny anymore.

By way of explaining this, I have to talk about music a little bit. You may have heard of M.I.A. by this point, as the tidal wave of hype she’s currently riding is starting to carry her into the pages of Spin and Rolling Stone. What you might not know, however, is that the discussion that’s been raging on around her for the last year and change has yielded one of the more interesting categories of music that I’ve come across recently: post-rap. M.I.A.’s music, you see, takes a lot of cues from things like dancehall music and British hip-hop and Timbaland, but doesn’t necessarily demonstrate any particular loyalty to them; her music sounds like what you’d get if you asked someone with her taste who’s also really, really good at making music to make an album that sounds cool as all fuck to them. The problem, of course, is that these are all things that have deep meaning for other people, and nobody wants to see the things they keep dear held out to everyone for a nice Blueshammering.

I won’t bore you with the details of how the argument’s playing out, but I will say that at some point, someone described her sound as “post-rap world music”, and I just about fell out of my chair in envy. It’s totally defensible to talk about M.I.A.’s music in terms of rap or dancehall just like it was totally fine to talk about Remain in Light in terms of African polyrhythms; you just have to be willing to admit that it’s a work of appropriation. Arular is not a rap album, or a dancehall album, or a whatever – but it does work like that, and that’s all that matters. It’s music that works because we all know how rap works. <>

I think, then, that it’s fair to say that my attraction to South Korean cinema is so profound because it’s as close as we’ve gotten to “post-cinema”. It’s worthwhile to watch movies like Spin Kick (or better yet, good Korean movies!) because we can use them as Rosetta Stones to figure out exactly how cinema works and where we stand in relation to that. I’ve found that the best Korean movies are easily sold to other people in pop culture terms; if you know someone who likes Se7en or Kill Bill, you know somebody who wants to see Oldboy even if they don’t know it, etc. By this point, we’re all so familiar with how cinema works – both the West and South Korea – that we don’t even have to worry about making something comprehensible; we’re all fundamentally speaking the same language.

Critics have been talking about the “death of cinema” since the French New Wave ground to a halt, arguing that the medium of cinema has been steadily losing its vitality as the shock of the new wears off. It’s hard to disagree, really; by this point all we definitely know about cinema’s relationship to the world is that it can choose to either reflect reality or not reflect it at all, and there aren’t a lot of directions to go once you’ve exhausted those particular possibilities. But I categorically object to the idea that there’s nowhere left to go. I think that cinema may be uniquely equipped to give us the kind of perspective rich parents hope to instill in their kids by sending them to public schools, the kind that teaches us that simply because we’re all the same doesn’t mean we’re not very different too (and vice versa), and I think that’s a far more relevant lesson about the world and the people that inhabit it than some pedantic work of bullshit like Ray. Movies may not be able to show us anything new, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t show us anything at all. One would think that that would be the point of cinema.

Again, I don’t want to attach any undue significance to Spin Kick; I may have enjoyed it, but it didn’t really send me anywhere (or at least that’s not the point). My guess is that if I weren’t totally sick in the head for ontology, I would have returned it without a second thought. It’s just that it’s rare to find a foreign movie which you can deal with so thoroughly like a domestic one, and even rarer when you can analyze it without being beholden to its quality; it’s thrilling to deal with cinema as the object of a cipher rather than as a cipher itself. The dialogue between the movies and the audience has reached the point where we know what’s up when one of the young punks in Spin Kick  says “Tae Kwon Do’s for faggots”; regardless of what country he’s from, you know he’s a mouthy little shit who’ll end the movie with a newfound respect for blah blah blah. We get it, thank God.

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Gloriously Inappropriate

By this point, my guess is that I’ve enjoyed Roger Avery’s The Rules of Attraction more than just about anybody on earth not involved in its production. Of course, considering how nearly every single thing I heard about it upon its release in 2002 was unhesitatingly negative, this may not be much of an accomplishment, but facts are facts, and the fact is simply that I can watch this movie forever in a completely unironic way. Everyone who writes this movie off as “shitty” or “empty” is both wrong and stupid (though mainly wrong), and I am right. It’s that simple.

It’s not that I can’t understand why people hate Rules so much – far from it, since their reasons were pretty much sufficient to keep me away from it for close to two years after its release. When people complain about how it’s oppressively stylized (read: “annoying”) or how it doesn’t come to a resolution (“depressing”) or how it takes the cheap way out with lots of drug use and sex and pop music (pretty self-explanatory, although I never really saw it as a negative), I can’t really mount an argument. Rules is absolutely a movie that offers no reassurance whatsoever and inflicts a degree of artistic oppression on its audience usually reserved for the two loathsome Andersons; being opposed to it is simply the other side of the coin of being opposed to Reality Bites because it’s “too Hollywood”. This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable stance to take.

Of course, I love Reality Bites too: movies about philosophical concepts are rare enough, but movies about philosophical concepts that don’t come down to the formula of Story + Talking About Philosophy, that actually operate under the conditions that they propose – those are rarer than hen’s teeth. We’re ten-plus years removed from the release of Reality Bites and, if the post-9/11 media is to be believed, at least four years removed from the “death of irony”, but I continue to be impressed by the way the film’s definition of irony (paraphrase from memory: “It’s when the situational meaning is completely different from the literal meaning”) plays out in the film’s resolution; what else is the conclusion to that movie besides characters making a choice between the literal and situational meanings of the term “love”? Movies like this are incredibly useful if you like to think about what nebulous concepts like irony have to do with your life – certainly useful enough to put up with all the bullshit that led the movie from conception through production and right up to the point at which you saw it.

I guess it’s possible to describe myself as “lucky” in at least one way: if someone asks me to define my life in terms of one idea, I can comfortably say “propriety” without feeling like I’m leaving much out. My guess is that I’m not alone, if simply because I can’t be the only person whose parents did their damnedest to instill values in them contradictory to their place in society. My dad was a respected ophthalmologist for Duke University, and my family kept some correspondingly high-brow company; when I went home for Christmas, my mom told the story about how she nearly had to decapitate Stanley Fish when, at a party, he knocked a glass of wine out of her hand and shrank into the background to avoid being blamed. Yet in spite of that, I was essentially raised as a post-sixties liberal – I still remember being “corrected” when I came back from elementary school having been shown and impressed by a video of one of Reagan’s speeches, for instance, and I can’t even begin to count the number of lectures I sat through about notions of equality between races or genders or whatever.

My point is this: while I certainly don’t begrudge my parents even a little bit for their efforts or their net worth, I can say without hesitation that to a certain extent, it does play hell on a kid’s mind to reconcile notions of equality with the presence of the housekeeper. It’s really not even so much the contradiction between the two as it is the fact that you have to deal with it seemingly straight out of the gate: it turns issues of class into day-to-day stuff, and the process of learning about issues of class and other issues like it almost becomes part of the background noise rather than the developmental signal itself. Over time, you barely even recognize that you’re making a decision in the first place, and that’s where the trouble starts.

I don’t mean to imply that Rules is all about class (although the three protagonists clearly come from some level money), but it is about the result of the same kind of process – the effects that arise when people confuse “instincts” with “decisions”. Rules goes above and beyond most movies ever made in an effort to get you into the characters’ head-spaces; you may be horrified and outraged by what the characters are doing, but moments where you’re unclear as to what you’re watching happen in Rules are few and far between. Following Rules, in other words, is easy; it’s just that the characters themselves are so profoundly and distinctly fucked up that it’s occasionally a little difficult to make any sense out of any of it.

This is, I think, because Rules doesn’t necessarily try to make sense; it merely plunges you into the subjectivities of the characters and leaves everything else up to you. Rules has a very long and complex pre-title sequence; it opens with Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) telling you that the story you’re about to hear isn’t necessarily worthwhile right before throwing you into a maze of voice-over and editing tricks and oppressively subjective shots. And yet right from the jump, you can tell that there’s a profound disconnect between the values these kids project onto the world in order to make it make sense and the way the world actually works. Deciding whether someone’s gay or not is a profoundly political action with legitimate real-world consequences, and yet Paul (Kip Pardue)’s first line in the film is a conclusion to that effect. Clearly we’re not following these characters from the beginning of their story – only from the beginning of the film’s story.

I eat shit like this up with a spoon. One of the main problems that I always have with reading and discussing movies is that since they’re pitched as such complete and self-contained products, I’m tempted to draw conclusions about reality from a thing which offers artificial openings and conclusions. Suppose that twenty years after the conclusion of Casablanca, Rick decides that he hates Captain Renault and gets back together with Ilsa – what does that do to the lessons of the movie itself? More importantly, what if we don’t get to see any of that; what if it just happens and we have no way of knowing about it? By contrast, Rules is clearly “incomplete” (it even ends in the middle of a line of dialogue), and as such we’re free to take whatever we want out of it. It’s just a movie, right?

But here’s the thing about Rules: it matches its realities up the same way real-world realities match up. Put another way, we can’t necessarily point to things in the movie and say “reality”, but we can talk about the movie using the same terms that we’d use to talk about the real world. Midway through the movie, Paul goes home for some reason and suffers through an incident where a friend of the family (named “Dick”, hurr hurr hurr) makes a gigantic scene seemingly for no reason. That’s fucked up, no matter how you slice it; my friends might not have picked a fight with my family exactly like that or for Dick’s reasons (whatever they are), but friends picking fights with your family = fucked up. The open-endedness practically forces you to make independent value judgments.

And then it throws you completely for a loop. It’s a little tricky to discuss the central scene in the movie without giving a lot of the movie itself away; for the sake of convenience, I’ll call it the Harry Nilsson scene, since the whole scene is set to A Certain Amazing Harry Nilsson Song. Formally, this isn’t unusual for the film; as soon as the opening credits stop rolling, it dives right into a montage set to the Cure’s “Six Different Ways” (AKA the good song by the Cure), and not too much later there’s a VERY neat split-screen montage to a Donovan song. Unlike these earlier side-trips, however, the Harry Nilsson scene isn’t just a fun/interesting way to get to Point B; it’s about showing you something and making damn certain that you understand how serious it is.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I doubt I’m making any sense (although you’ll thank me when you see the movie. Which you will). What’s important that you understand is that all of a sudden, the world of the movie will treat some things with profound gravity. However, this movie being what it is, I do have an alternative example of the kind of seriousness I’m dancing around.

Rules occurs at a college, and consequently a lot of the events take place at parties. Now, because Rules was adapted from a (presumably loathsome) Bret Easton Ellis novel, these parties are all given coolly apocalyptic names – the “Dress To Get Screwed Party”, the “Pre-Saturday Night Party”, and most relevant here, the “End of the World Party”. Yeah yeah yeah; all in good wry collegiate elitist fun, right?

Well, according to IMDB, the End of the World Party was filmed on September 11^th, 2001. Hell of a downer, innit?

The value of this movie, then, is based entirely on its capacity to call your sense of propriety before the judge. Set next to the Harry Nilsson scene, the logic of the characters seems trite and petty, just like the logic you use to figure the movie out seems pretty small next to the events of September 11^th; it has power because it can all of a sudden make you confront things which are much bigger than you ever expected. The term I want to use to describe this movie (even though it’s patently unfit for service here) is “wake-up call”, simply because few movies actively call your judgment into question on any level, let alone two at once. And while I understand that not everybody wants or needs to have their values checked (and as such should probably stay far, far away from this movie), I can’t see how that diminishes the accomplishments of this movie in any way. That it works at all is miracle enough.

 

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Same As the Old Boss

It’s always seemed rather strange to me that, in spite of the fact that film critics may be the only unavoidable critics working (q.v. any movie preview on TV), there’s not really a “scene” of criticism or even really of cinematic discussion. Naturally there are a thousand counterexamples, but when you really get down to it, “film criticism” as we know it basically boils down to a forest of independent voices howling into the void and occasionally coming to agree on some stuff; we haven’t had a movement since Cahiers took a Turn in 1968.

Contrast that to the pop music scene, which is of course alive and kicking. My favorite example is ILX, a message board where you can find roughly a billion people who write for a billion publications; it doesn’t seem unfair to credit them with a lot of recent advances in pop music habits, not the least of which are the emergence of grime and the flowering of the MP3 blog.

Why exactly isn’t there a scene like this for film (not that I’m necessarily advocating one) - is pop music just better (no), or is the medium of film too sophisticated for this kind of scene-fostering(also no)? I can think of three reasons:

1. With music, there’s more room to creatively describe stuff, which is the easiest, most democratic method of criticism around – even YOOOOOO can come up with a funny thing to compare the new Interpol album to. It is, however, worth pointing out that this turns criticism into multiplayer Notepad.
2. Music is more easily worked into your everyday life – you can’t surreptitiously watch movies at work, but you can play your radio or whatever and nobody’ll even notice.
3. The iPod.

You think I’m kidding about the last one, but you’re wrong. iPods come up over and over and over again on ILX, usually just referentially but occasionally as a subject of legitimate discussion. By this point it seems safe to say that the iPod is the most significant consumer electronic to come out since the VCR; other items may have moved more units, but none of them have changed the users interact with the entertainment half as much. It may seem like a status symbol, but it’s a symbol in the same way that the horse used to be a symbol for the gentry back in the day – it only represents something because it gives the user the power to something that the non-user absolutely cannot. As you can probably tell, I recently bought one.

By now, everybody can probably sing the iPod’s biggest selling point along with me: “You can always have total access to all your music”. Which is more or less true; I can certainly say that I’ve gotten into a bunch of new artists since getting the iPod, since I generally only want to hear Dizzee Rascal right when I actually want to hear him (although I reeeeeeeeeeeeally want to hear him right then). But in actuality, this isn’t really the side of the die that keeps me from feeling like I’ve wasted my money; that’s an honor reserved for the “shuffle” function.

Shuffle is exactly what you think it is: it throws every song on your iPod into one playlist ordered at random, and I swear before God and Christ together that it is absolutely the most fascinating thing you will ever access if the act of listening to music is something you like. It’s like the perfect synthesis of the radio and your taste; you’re not necessarily going to hear something you never saw coming (still the major selling point of the radio), but the next best thing to that is “not knowing what’s coming up next”, and that ain’t half bad. I doubt I would have ever had a split second for Dntel’s “The Dream of Evan and Chan” if it hadn’t come right on the heels of TV on the Radio’s “Satellite”, but it did, and now I can’t stop listening to it.

Now, given that you’re the one loading up your iPod with the music files themselves, you’d think that the attraction to this feature would be driven by the amount of control it offers you; you would also be wrong. Shuffle isn’t attractive because it presents you with stuff that matches your taste (or if that’s why it’s attractive to you, then you’re probably always half of a very irritating conversation) – it’s attractive because the power of selection is out of your hands. The sneaky thing about the iPod is that it’s actually a very smart piece of electronics, in that it can manage your data way better than you’d have ever thought, and right out of the box no less; I remember being floored once I realized that it factored out the word “the” when arranging a list of artists alphabetically. Clearly, this is a machine that knows how to organize information, and it doesn’t organize information like you do, unless of course you happen to be wholly electronic. It’s like catching a radio station and SkyNet holding hands.

My point is that film can’t possibly compete with that. The whole idea of cinema is that you apply logic and recognition skills you learn in the real world to a fake one, and in a relationship like that, there isn’t really a whole lot of power left to give over to the gadgets. If anything, the gadgetry of film empowers the audience; the handheld camera made the audience filmmakers, and the VCR (and later DVD player) turned any television into a potential site for cinema. I suppose that you could make a device that lets you cut movies up into even smaller units and then shuffle scenes or shots, but Christ almighty would that ever get irritating - I mean, there's got to be SOME respect for the form, right?

So I guess there’s no burgeoning scene for film right now because there’s nothing really new going on, or at least as far as the relationship between the consumer and the product goes. This isn’t to say that there’s no work being done in those terms – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 11’9”01 short is nothing if not eleven minutes of just that – but you get my point. People are always going to be drawn to the brand new, and right now the aesthetic experiences offered up by the iPod are just to shiny to be ignored. There’s movement in a direction going on with music right now, and that would win out.

Which is exactly why I find myself very interested in film all of a sudden. Film right now is well past its iPod stage; the VCR is old and busted, and the DVD player – which is really just a VCR for the new millennium – is only marginally more interesting than a toaster oven by this point. And yet the VCR totally exploded our notions of how we interact with film; suddenly audiences were surrendering more to a film’s content than to the experience of going to a movie, sitting in the dark, and staring at a giant image. Now we’re stuck with a raging debate about whether people who learn about film from watching DVDs and videotapes are actually learning anything about film whatsoever; I would imagine that there’s a storm brewing in the music community as to whether someone can legitimately understand a work outside of its original context.

I dunno. This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me; truly modern civilization always has the watermark of accelerated consumption. All I’m saying is that we should be dealing with cinema right now specifically because we deal with it more slowly, and if that means movies are replacing books (and, presumably, music is replacing movies?), then so be it. I still read books too, y’know.

 

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Okay, so I swear that I'm about to sit down and write a sizeable thing, but first (via ILF), BAHAHAHAHAHA:

Filmmaker: What would you say to critics of yours that think maybe you are contrary for the sake of being a contrarian?

White: I’m not a contrarian at all.

I long for the day when you can stab someone over the internet.

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ugh.

I swear before Christ that I've got about three essays nearly fully-formed, so there will in fact be content coming soon (fuck, I'm paying for this blog, so there better be) - but CERTAINLY not today. I always did think that characterizing It's A Wonderful Life as a Christmas movie was a little misleading, since if there's a holiday that makes that movie work for the audience, it's Valentine's Day. Thinkabootit.

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Then I'll Dig A Tunnel From My Window To Yours

I tend to be pretty inconsistent with my touchstones. The longest I’ve ever had a “favorite” movie was probably the five years I spent supporting Pulp Fiction (which, along with my copy of the Stop Making Sense soundtrack held over from eighth grade, still stands as one of the two objects I can cite on to assure myself that I had some taste before I went off to college), but it’s easy to be loyal when you don’t know any better; by my first college Christmas break, that title had changed hands dozens of times. “Best”, too, never really settled down, even once I was able to divorce “best” from “favorite”. It really only gets worse as you get more specific – “funniest”, “best written”, “coolest”, and such are all just a disc change away from revolution – to the point where now I really don’t bother to keep track, except in good fun.

The exception to this is “most interesting”; I have yet to see anything come close to being as interesting as Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece Playtime, and in spite of the fact that I never anticipated seeing a movie like Playtime before actually seeing it, I still can’t imagine anything else being as completely engrossing as it. The caveat, of course, is that this is only true because I am a sad little dork of a person who reads film theory and nonfiction for fun, and there is a wide gulf of opinion between me and people for whom those damned Lord of the Rings movies are the ideal cinematic experience. This is fine; this is democracy in action, and I am no longer an (avowed) socialist. But I have yet to come across a cinematic category of interest into which I can’t find a way to shoehorn Playtime, and it has a nasty long-standing habit of crushing all contenders.

Playtime is a visual movie, a phrase which, if you don’t think “cinema” has any self-sustaining appeal all by itself, generally means “boring as all fuck”. This is not an unfair way to describe Playtime, I guess; the film basically follows Tati’s iconic character Monsieur Hulot around for a day in a big city as he tries to get a job, meets an old army friend, goes to a club, blah blah blah. The fact that it’s a comedy doesn’t really help anything in this case; Tati’s brand of comedy is descended straight from the silent tradition, so it’s less Uproarious Laughter and more Humorous Little Things. There really isn’t any possible way to make it sound cool.

And then you start watching it and you forget all of that. The essence of what Playtime actually is is basically “Here’s how the modern world works” rendered as a comedy, and the essence of what makes it so mindfuckingly interesting is how literally what I just said plays out. Playtime is all about showing you components of modern life and how they actually look when you pay attention to them apart from their actual use; if you’ve seen Crumb (and get to the video store right the fuck now if you haven’t) and remember the photos he drove around the city taking and then worked them into his drawings ever after when he’d forget what telephone poles looked like – okay, imagine if someone made an entire fictional film with that attitude. “This stuff isn’t put here to be visually pleasing”, Crumb points out; it’s there to fill a function, and we tend to ignore it when we’re not engaging with that function. Like Crumb’s art, Playtime is all about confronting this stuff at a distance from its functionality; if it has a point, it’s pretty much just that the modern world is a crazy, disorganized place where ridiculous stuff happens all around you all the time and you just don’t notice it.

And I do mean “all around” and “all the time”. What defines the character of Playtime’s greatness is how absurdly busy every shot is: shots will contain dozens of sight gags, all happening simultaneously, and all you can do as a viewer is dart your eyes around the frame trying to keep up. You can sit there awed by the giant scope of the cavernous rooms, but you’re going to miss the nuns’ headdresses flapping like birds’ wings’, and you’re not going to be able to try to discern which figures up against the windows are real and which are cardboard cutouts, and there’s even a pretty good chance that you’ll miss out on the central character’s introduction in the film (which I did until I saw the film for a third time), not to mention about fifty other equally minor things which are just fun to notice. And this is all within the first three minutes of the film.

Playtime is a very, very, very, very, very big movie. It’s shot in 70mm, so basically you can see twice as much stuff going on as you normally could, and Tati’s sets were so gigantic that they were actually referred to by the film press as “Tati-town” since basically he had to build a fake city (it’s worth mentioning that Tati went broke making Playtime, both financially and in terms of critical reputation). But the end result is something huge and unique; you’ll never see a movie try to force you to sort through more stuff at once – it actually pretty much sets you up to fail. I’ve seen Playtime close to ten times now (only once in the theater), but every time I watch it, I notice new sight gags which make the timeline of the film’s events just a little bit clearer.

If there is a problem with this method of filmmaking, it is that it makes for some intensely frustrating struggles trying to describe why this is worthwhile. The easiest way would just be to suggest that you click on the picture to the left and imagine everything moving –all those little elements distinctly operating on their own, each a potential site for something cool and wonderful. Thankfully, however, this is 2004; we live in a hypertextual world, and I can safely assume that my readers know about the Arcade Fire.

When the Arcade Fire’s debut album Funeral came out last year, the critical community was split into two camps: the overwhelming majority who claimed that Funeral was one of the most vibrant, compelling albums to come down the pipe in a long, long time (true), and the tiny (yet very vocal) minority indignantly pointing out that the Arcade Fire weren’t necessarily doing anything new or interesting or particularly significant (also true). But even the haters couldn’t deny the power of the Arcade Fire’s live show, where all eight thousand members of the band would be switching instruments several times per song, and you’d have to deal with all these people singing at the top of their lungs right at the audience, and periodically a guy who looks like Napoleon Dynamite runs around and wails on the walls with some drumsticks. My friend David went to go see their first show in Los Angeles and said people were just staggering out of the club, clearly unable to process the tidal wave of stimuli they’d just been brought to face; I saw them live last month and I can absolutely vouch for this.

The difference, of course, is that with the CD, you the audience retain a certain degree of control over the experience – the experience of their songs is pretty self-evident, and you can pretty much get it without mining every second of every song to figure out which instruments come in where and why. But the live show is just a tornado; the organs of perception have their limits, and you can’t focus on Napoleon Dynamite over by the walls and the girl playing violin with the most passionate intensity you’ve ever seen at the same time. It just takes you over, and the fun lies in keeping up – or, if you’re lucky, being totally unable to keep up with the parts and just giving yourself over to appreciating the sum. Because you’re in charge of how you receive the experience, the quality of the time you spend in the band’s company is entirely up to you.

Okay, Playtime is that. You can’t possibly keep up with it; the challenge and the fun lies in noticing things, little elements that flesh out the logic of the world, and this is a completely independent exercise. Playtime’s reward for You The Viewer is a genuine sense of an individual experience, which is rare enough in any medium but especially in the medium of film. Film is all about the shared experience, which is completely interesting on one level and insanely frustrating on another; I can’t tell you how dispiriting it is to argue with clods who’ve seen a movie you find meaningful but got something random and completely idiotic from it, because unless you’re enough of an asshole to say that they’re wrong for not having your catalog of life experiences, then their position is wholly supportable by the text. (You have no idea how many skulls I wanted to thump after Fahrenheit 9/11 on both sides of the political divide. Jesus.) But with Playtime, theoretically you could have someone make a chronological list of every single thing they noticed in the film and still get an entirely different experience from it simply because your eyes wandered at a certain point. Compare that to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (an insanely interesting film in its own right, but absolutely one which guides you along a path to a point), and, well, there you go.

Consequently, I don’t really want to get into any of the reasons why I continually find Playtime to be such a fascinating viewing experience, although I will anyway: I can find stuff in it about the relationship between modernity and the individual, or I can find stuff in it about how you can organize a movie, or I can relate the viewing experience to the experience of walking around in the world, or I can find stuff in it about the ongoing dialogue between the medium of cinema and our notions of “reality”, or I can just sit back and enjoy some masterfully-crafted physical comedy, or god only knows what else. The point which Playtime alone seems to be able to convey cinematically is that finding the point isn’t the point; the point is to look in the first place, and even if you find something, the point is to keep looking. I’d pretty much describe life as having the same point, but of course that’s hardly the point.

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Gary Busey: Crazy, for Christ

Mr. BUSEY: "I was raised as a Christian, baptized when I was 12, but I didn't really have any idea of what it was like to be a true, full-blooded Christian until I went through the experiences that God gave me to go through ...

MEEUWSEN: Yeah.

Mr. BUSEY: ... which were cocaine

I wish this interview were book-length.

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I submitted this to Stylus Magazine a while back; I was told that Josh Timmerman was slow in the getting-back-to-folks department, but after a month and a half I figured I just got shot down. However, I still think it's one of the better things I've ever written, and now I have this blog. SO:

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Two Things

I have two things to say about the film 11"9'01:

1. By this point, having seen 11’9”01 five or six times, I have found one conclusion to be inescapable: Fuck a Michael Moore. Seriously. I mean yes, fuck a Fox News too, but with television’s transparent corporate structuring you kind of have to factor (no pun intended) in a certain level of institutional perversion. Michael Moore, on the other hand, makes movies – hell, he makes movies which repudiate the corporate structure both in essence and substance. I have the right to expect better of him.

It’s not that I disagree with his views – far, far from it – but rather with the paradoxical lack of democracy in his films. Your faith in Moore as a filmmaker is fundamentally tied to whether or not you believe what he shows you – that is to say, if you buy into his assertion that, say, corporations have no right to abandon their workers, then you’re probably going to get more out of Roger & Me than someone who doesn’t. I don’t mean to come down on agitprop cinema or anything, but seriously, good god, has the corpse of cinema decomposed to the point where even in light of the global events of the last few years, this Manichaean pot-bangery is still the best available option?

Thank God for films like 11’9”01, films which attempt to break free of the vacuous objectivity that plagues most movies and damn near all political ones. Allow me to quote the monograph that gradually fades in to open the film:

11’9’01, September 11^th: A Film.
11 Directors from different countries and cultures.

11 Visions of the tragic events that occurred in New York City on September 11^th 2001.
11 points of view committing their subjective conscience.

Complete freedom of expression.

11’9”01, you see, is an omnibus film, an assemblage of short films contributed by multiple directors focusing on a single topic. In addition to being a really fun and interesting way to make and/or watch a movie, the approach also has the effect of forcibly preventing the audience from locking into a single subjectivity due to the constant hopping from short to short. Apply that formula to a historical event with the inherent potency of a September 11^th, and you’ve got the recipie for a damned interesting, damned thought-provoking movie. I found many of the shorts to be dull or amateurish, but there’s no denying the alchemic tension when you’re forced to confront, say, a harshly critical piece (Ken Loach’s recounting of the American-sponsored coup in Chile) immediately after a work of charm, if not outright fantasy (Idrissa Ouedraogo’s story of five poverty-stricken African boys who plot to capture Osama bin Laden for the reward money). It’s not so really that fourth gear differs radically from third; rather, it’s the fact that you, the viewer, are forced to do the shifting yourself.

Of course, the inherent downside to this approach – and here’s where it gets good – is that since the films aren’t necessarily going to be equally good, not all of the viewpoints are going to command the same degree of respect. A few weeks ago I watched If You Were Me, an omnibus film organized by the Human Rights Commission of Korea, and forgot nearly everything outside of what the “best” contributions had to teach. It’s a serious flaw in that it disrespects the issues being presented even more than the artists presenting them, and given that omnibus films are inherently issue-oriented, well, it ain’t good.

Again, this is why the Lord put 11’9”01 on this earth. In an effort to ward off this critical negligence, producer Alain Brigand (director of Microcosmos and Winged Migration) imposed one elegant limitation on the filmmakers: the films each had to be exactly eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame long (hence the title). I can’t say that I don’t see where the haters are coming from when they write this off as a gimmick since nobody’s really going to notice a single frame missing, but to do so almost seems like an act of willfully missing the point. It isn’t just that In This Galaxy Of Short Films None Is The Correct One – it’s that no viewpoint is formally privileged above the others. Everyone gets the exact same box of crayons.

The point of all of this, of course, is not to force the audience to pick a viewpoint which appeals most to them, but rather to meditate on what September 11^th and “context” have to do with each other. In terms of movies that get the audience to play along with the mechanism, I afford 11’9”01 the kind of esteem I usually reserve for things like Playtime; given the talent involved in the film, resisting the urge to choose “a favorite/the best” is a fruitless exercise at best, but doing just that goes against the film’s sine qua non. It’s an immensely nuanced work, one where participation on any level demands a certain level of political participation whether you’re aware of it or not. It’s also a work which, by virtue of the fact that your life doesn’t exist in a vacuum either, has held up outrageously well for me in the year since I’ve had it; I have yet to watch it without drawing a new conclusion on one or more of the shorts. But, I mean, hey, who needs that when we’ve got Lila Lipscomb beating us over the head with her sorrow?

Seriously. Fuck a Michael Moore.

2. MOTHER OF GOD, YOU HAVE TO SEE THE ONE BY ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ INARRITU. I MEAN MOTHER OF MOTHERFUCKING GOD, Y'ALL.

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I Can't Remember A Time Before You Were Telling That Story

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton is easily summed up: Small-Town Boy Loves Small Town Girl Who Loves Monolithic Movie Star; Hijinx Ensue, Characters Are Eventually Revealed, and It All Ends Just Like You Think. This, combined with the facts that the cast is led by two (essentially) non-actors, (2) the camera moves maybe two inches the entire time (helicopter shots excepted), (3) significant portions of this movie are tantamount to extended ads for Pringles and the Piggly-Wiggly chain, and (4) the soundtrack features a song whose hook is the horrendous line “We’ve got more bounce in California/Than all y’all combined” – and if your skin crawled when you read that, wait until you hear it – might reasonably lead you to presume that Win A Date is a bad movie, which it may well be. I certainly couldn’t tell you; I flat-out adore the piss out of it. Win a Date was easily – and I mean by a shameful margin – my favorite movie of 2004; I liked Oldboy far more, Invisible Ballots was way more interesting, and Before Sunset was better in every way, but favorite? Forget it.

Allow me to explain: at the time of this writing, I am 23 years old, and I have never gotten to be in love. This is, I hasten to add, very different from never being in love; I fall in love as regularly as a frat boy buys cheap beer. Some people are just emotionally hardwired for certain events; some people get enraged easily, others weep like little bitches at the drop of a hat. I fall in love. It’s what I do.

The point I want to make, however, is that I don’t get to fall in love; it just happens, and when it does, it tends to manifest itself in wildly inappropriate ways, and thus nothing ends up working out like I’d like. (Aside: It should hardly be a surprise that I get so worked up about the music and movies and books and such that I love; “inappropriate” doesn’t really matter when you’re dealing with an inanimate object. And before you say it, anyone who thinks that loving a song or a movie is any different from loving another person must be boring as all fuck. There’s a self-evident reason the same word applies to both situations.) Which, of course, sucks, but then again it pretty much sucks consistently for everyone; I can count the people I know who’ve legitimately found and held onto love on one hand and have fingers left over, and even in those cases I’d like to see how their stories play out. A giant chunk of the human experience involves coming to terms with the fact that You, Chosen Scion of History, aren’t necessarily entitled to fulfillment; you may end up being an incomplete wreck like everybody since the Garden.

There are, of course, a million billion better movies than Win a Date at addressing this precise dilemma, even if you want to confine yourself to lightweight teenager movies. I, however, am not shackled by an allegiance to quality; I just want to see something that I want to see. And when I want to see a movie about a loser-y guy who shouldn’t get to fall in love with some impossibly perfect girl, I end up with Win A Damn Date in my DVD player like clockwork, because it doesn’t aim to do much other than that, and it milks that for all it’s worth. Fuck, just look at the poster:

The one piece of practical knowledge I took away from the lone filmmaking class I took during film school is that you organize your frame by dividing it four times, like the keys on a numeric keypad (just look at your keyboard), and give the most space in that middle square to the most important part of the frame. Look back at the poster: if you divided it like a frame, the most important part would be dominated by Kate Bosworth and Josh Duhamel, with poor Topher Grace sulking somewhere in the back.

In essence, this is the whole movie. You may THINK that a story about Small Town Girl Loves Et Cetera is actually about the girl, but it ain’t. This is absolutely Topher Grace’s movie; in twenty years, when we’re all light-years beyond sick of him and he’s accepting his fourth Oscar for playing some Brave Person Stricken With Crippling Disease/Addiction/Retardation, you will hear Win a Date brought up overandoverandover again. If you can successfully follow this movie without judging it, you’ll see that while Bosworth and Duhamel receive more screen-time and anchor more of the film’s drama, Grace is the one who actually has to do something; it’s his character who actually nuts up and takes charge of the situation while everyone else sits around taking advantage of the situation. (I guess it’s fair to say that Grace is basically just playing Eric Foreman. It’s also fair to say that you can probably trace a lot of Tom Hanks back to Bosom Buddies, or a lot of Welles back to Shakespeare. Originality is a shell game at best.)

And what Grace does is fucking PHENOMENAL. It’s easy to be a character actor – which Grace is, and will continue to be for at least the foreseeable future – if you don’t mind being one-dimensional. Topher Grace is, in a word, not. He plays his character as being as furious as he is decent, as vicious as he is sweet, as myopic as he is aware, and thankfully he does it seemingly without a hint of Tobey Maguire-esque “Look at how deliberately I teeter between these two poles” (which is of course the OTHER big trick of the character actor trade, especially when someone has aspirations of losing the “character” part). I realize that I’m asking a lot from most of you to take me at my word on this one, but I’ll stick up for Grace’s performance in this movie the way that guitar people stick up for Eddie Van Halen: either what he does works, or fuck you.

Last night, I sat down with a gigantic E&J & Ginger Ale to re-watch Chasing Amy. When I say this, I don’t quite mean what you think I mean; I mean that I watched Chasing Amy with the commentary track playing, which in a way means I didn’t watch Chasing Amy at all. I do this pretty frequently (considering that I would support the violent launching of Kevin Smith into the sun) for two reasons: first of all, the commentary track is deeply, deeply funny (and due mostly to Ben Affleck, of all people), but secondly and more important, the movie just doesn’t hold up for me. I tried to watch the movie properly a few months ago and just couldn’t do it, and it isn’t even due to the fact that giant sections of it are really crappy: it’s that I can’t find a single interesting thing that this movie has to say about reality. I’ll grant it that it’s constructed far more skillfully than Win a Date, which genuinely doesn’t play a single unexpected card, but my experience watching Chasing Amy wasn’t fundamentally different from watching a hypothetical high-school production of Brigadoon. It exists in the world of texts as something that you follow along until it’s over, and then move on (and frankly I can sit here all day listing things I’d rather follow along than a sexual-identity love story spangled with Kevin Smith dialogue).

But the dirty little secret about Chasing Amy is that it doesn’t really have anything to say, outside of maybe a few interesting little nuggets about the choice-versus-destiny debate over homosexuality (which, in any event, it abandons completely once the two characters need to hook up). The situations that occur in this movie are pretty specific; the sudden realization that the object of your romantic desire eats from a catcher’s mitt is pretty far abstracted from the kind of realizations most of the audience has to tap into in order to actually connect with the drama. The genius at the heart of Win A Date, by contrast, is its sweeping general immediacy; Bosworth and Grace can’t happen because, I mean, LOOK AT HER. LOOK AT HIM. LOOK AT HER. LOOK AT HER SOME MORE. The dynamic stands on its own two feet without a single thing to do with your life (although if you are, like me, Less Than, it’s pathetically easy to empathize), and this carries the film throughout: you may never have attempted to assert your virility by chopping more wood than the other guy, but surely you’ve tried to out-_____ some other guy for a girl before, right?

Maybe now you see what I’m getting at when I froth at the mouth about Grace’s greatness in this role. What he brings to the character is conflict; the film makes no effort to try to hide his cognizance of the fact that he’s not good enough for her, but damned if he doesn’t just say “Fuck it” every so often anyway, albeit in halting Topher Grace-esque fashion. As such, Win a Date affords him ample opportunities to do two things: seethe and give up. Anyone who’s ever watched That 70s Show knows just how good Grace is at both of these; now imagine him doing them in a movie environment, where he isn’t compelled to go for the Big Laugh every minute and actually lets him explore the pathos. It absolutely hits home.

The irony, of course, is that, if asked which was the more realistic movie, most people would probably answer with Chasing Amy, justifying every snarky comeback you can imagine me making. Chasing Amy is more realistic in a very limited, arguably artificial sense: it’s closer to reality in that there are lesbians and cigarettes and facial hair and sometimes it looks like it might rain. But it has much less to do with real life; if, in real life, you kiss your best friend (especially if this friend is a guy), odds are he won’t sit around listening to you justify why you two should have sex. Win a Date’s kiss-yr-best-friend scenario plays out much more realistically; there’s actually shock and terror and uncertainty involved, and it wraps up with a miserably deflating copout. This is at least in the neighborhood of what would happen.

But ultimately, Win a Date is the more realistic movie because they actually talk about more realistic things, by which I mean that they talk about amorphous, indefinite things like love or celebrity. I’ll admit that it’s not done in any particularly skillful way – Win a Date is definitely one of those movies where everybody gets a turn to speak their piece, and they speak it In Character – but since when is that really the point? The monologues in Win a Date are the kind of phenomenal where, if you’re prone to thinking about this kind of stuff, you catch yourself stealing the movie’s lines; lord knows I’ve applied the “love/big love/great love” thing (and about seven thousand other equally effective things) to my life because it just makes sense. Chasing Amy, on the other hand, is nearly useless when it comes to its talking points; it offers the protagonist two opposing (and idiotically outlined) viewpoints, and then the protagonist…fucks up. And life goes on. And then the movie’s over. I suppose that’s a more “realistic” treatment of life compared to the happy ending of Win a Date, but it’s not like I needed a movie to remind me that life goes on; I have late-night reruns of Dear John for that.

Win a Date, to reiterate, is a shitty film, an embarrassing travesty to own, and the kind of possession that drives you to demand that your friends call before they come over so that you can hide your shame. I, however, also own a Girls Aloud album AND BaseketBall, so there’s not really a whole lot of damage left to do. But if you have a need for a movie like this, Win a Date is unhesitatingly the one I would recommend. For one thing, you can love it as much as you want.

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