We haven’t blogged here in forever but we’re still watching movies. Half the team’s in Europe, but we were lucky enough to catch Ocean’s 13 together before he went. I’ve seen the Facebook movie twice and I have a lot of competing opinions about it but this HRO post jumped out at me as particularly ‘relevant’ (always). Maybe this post will be an isolated incident; but movie night is getting its start again tonight, so maybe (in heirloomtomaino style) this will be the beginning of a new period in information movies’ bloglife.
<3 movies/miss blogging/h8 my ‘lack of discipline.’
viahipsterrunoff:
Look at these fucking dunces
If they only knew the real story
If they really knew what it was like to have
genuine baller ass status
In the Mood for Love (2001, dir. Wong Kar Wai)
This movie hits right before the American reinvigoration in fifties and sixties domesticity, and I think it hits harder. Largely because the scene is the important unit here. Not the overall movie. Each scene has a crushing purpose that plays out in a slight, common manner. Of course when strung together there’s inter-relation, and a narrative bubbles up, but it didn’t have to be that way. And if you excise just one, it plays independently of everything else. That’s how the dramas in real life play out: one discreet action at a time.
But even in the seeming conservative nature of so much, the dedication to the time and the period and the spirit, the camera and the action do their job of differentiating themselves from real life. It is all play and make believe, so why not actually play with the make believe that’s going on? That’s what’s so good about their “roleplays.” It’s just an alternate film reality. But there’s no saying which is more important, or which is more real. That’s something I think Tsai Ming Liang does really well now, too, while Wong Kar Wai is busy playing around with My Blueberry Nights. Which I still love.
The only real things are the patterns on those dresses.
Shutter Island (2010, dir. Martin Scorcese)
Maybe it’s timely to write about this so many months later in the wake of the Lost finale. I didn’t watch that show, but I of course read the recaps, and it feeds into the major problem that so many storytellers have now. It’s hard to stay ahead of audiences now, it seems, because we’re not given enough of a reason to suspend disbelief. Instead, we usually sit on the outside and pick apart each action. Like watching a Shyamalan film: it’s not the movie that matters, but how quickly you can guess the twist. Thankfully, he’s moving on to The Last Airbender, because there’s only so many acceptable almost-super-natural reasons you can go through before the well runs completely dry.
It’s sad to see Scorcese, a rock that’s been sinking, fall prey to the need to try to twist us apart. What’s even sadder is to see audiences accept incoherence as elevated storytelling. It’s not. In the end, I think Martin might see that, too. Which is why the ending is actually so straightforward, so anticlimactic. But he’s no Cronenberg. Instead of making a B-list movie that somehow ends up being more, he makes an A-list event that makes you wonder what the point of the whole thing was.
I will say this, though: the question of which “cure” is better at the end is definitely a chilly one.
I’m going to be working through a tremendous backlog. Who “I” is will be obvious momentarily. Bare with me.
Whatever Works (2009, dir. Woody Allen)
My favorite part of this movie, behind Patricia Clarkson in this clip (the second and fourth shots), is a spectacular cabinet. Go Santo Loquasto!
The Matrix (1999, dir. Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski)
Dayereh (The Circle, 2000, dir. Jafar Panahi)
I don’t like to get upset about another culture/country’s problems because I know I am not nearly upset enough about the problems of my own. But this movie is difficult to watch without feeling like the situation in Iran is pretty fucked up. Add to that, that the filmmaker is currently in jail, held without charges, it seems because he was going to make a movie about the election protests last year. I just don’t know.
阿飞正传 (Days of Being Wild, 1990, dir. Wong Kar-wai)
Days of Heaven (1978)
“Days of 1978”
Zodiac (2007, dir. David Fincher)
It seems appropriate that for so long I’ve put off posting about this movie, the story of a murder case that dragged on for decades and remains unsolved, and that I watched the director’s cut which is 6 minutes longer than the original theatrical version (157 minutes total, I started it at like 5 a.m., natch). One scene in particular, in which Mark Ruffalo’s character eats a burger, gave me desperate cravings (the like of which I haven’t felt since Gary Busey ordered two meatball sandwiches, TWO, in Point Break). So a few days later I broke my generally vegetarian policy at Mr. Bartley’s with none-other-than Information Movies co-procrastinator Mr. WalkieTalkies.
“I shoulda had you get me three of these things.”
I saw this movie with my mom at the Kendall Square Cinema when it first came out; I was a junior in high school. What a good mom! She also took me to The Thin Red Line (ninth grade, at the Copley Square - closed) and Twelve Monkeys (sixth grade, at the Circle - closed). And she let me rent The Transformers Movie and The Muppet Movie (postmodernity distilled) as many times as I wanted when I was little. You are what you eat.
Burn After Reading (2008, dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)
In the DVD extras, the Coen brothers laugh about how Brad Pitt had to wear a hat to all his press events during filming because they had given him such a terrible hairdo. A lot of the reviews accused this movie of having a mean-spirited sense of humor. Yeah.
Collateral (2004, dir. Michael Mann)
This is one of the movies I’ve seen most, I own the DVD, I wrote a paper about it for a class in college (the importance of its digital camerawork). Two interesting facts on Wikipedia, Stuart Beattie, the screenwriter, wanted Robert De Niro to play Jamie Foxx’s character to make it a revisionist Taxi Driver — remake potential. Also, it was originally titled “The Last Domino;” anything is better than that but “Collateral” never really made sense to me, I think of it as just the word I use to refer it, not a word with a meaning that is relevant to the movie. I guess it is the basic meaning of the word that they mean — besides, accompanying, parallel — referring to the entangling of Max and Vincent’s fates. Also, in the sense of “collateral damage,” the unintended casualties. Still, I think there’s a better title out there.
The Front (1976, dir. Martin Ritt)
“Fellas… I don’t recognize the right of this committee to ask me these kind of questions. And furthermore, you can all go fuck yourselves.” I love the partial freeze frame effect — one that doesn’t try to hide itself, in fact, exposes the material the images are made on — I saw it again the other day in The Matrix. This movie is also noteworthy because Woody Allen is not writing or directing, which means some of his tics are repressed and we see him in shots he rarely uses (shot-reverse-shots and close-ups). It is similar to the experience of watching Larry David in Woody Allen’s most recent movie Whatever Works. which was supposedly originally written for Zero Mostel, Allen’s co-star here.
Chop Shop (2007, dir. Ramin Bahrani)
In 2005, I would pick up my dad’s car on Columbia Street in Somerville and walk by all the auto parts places. So when I first heard about this movie and saw some of the images I immediately placed it there on my mental map. Now, I can’t think of one without thinking of the other.
Each movie is a portal into the information totality.
By walkietalkies and georgeolken.
