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Films I Want To See At MIFF

In no particular order save that dictated by my subconscious:

Moonrise Kingdom

Because as much as I think Wes Anderson is an overrated filmmaker (with the exception of The Royal Tenenbaums which is so beautiful and has Gene Hackman, and anything with Gene Hackman is a winner, except for that last film he did with Ray Romano, ergh), I’m a sucker for the event movie experience and going to the Greater Union on Russell Street with thousands of hipsters to watch Bruce Willis’ restrained delivery of ironic non sequiturs set to whimsical music would be a pleasant way to pass 93 minutes (plus a good twenty minutes lining up in the cold and ten minutes after navigating the crowds on the way out, so that’s over two hours of event movie experience right there, of which the actual movie constitutes a mere 66%).

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Because I am an absolute sucker for those American indies that are ideologically suspect but emotionally affirming, intelligent but not overly so, easy to watch but also to engage further with and not-at-all independent: that is to say that they are “American” in every sense of the word.  Plus magical realism is an under-utilised IMHO way of using film expressionistically to demonstrate something of the emotional experience of young people.  Because it’s buzzy and film festivals are not only about watching movies, but about being part of the international cultural conversation, even if one must do so three to eight months later than everybody else.

Amour

Because Michael Haneke and death.

Harold & Maude

Because despite watching Hal Ashby’s movie precisely once, on my laptop, it is one of my favourite films.  Because it’s good to remind oneself that occasionally Hollywood does produce films that have integrity and creativity and say interesting things about the American experience.  Because it has a rather good soundtrack by Cat Stevens.

Gainsbourg by Gainsbourg/Souvenirs of Serge

Because I know almost nothing about Mr Gainsbourg or his creative work, and this is a shameful situation that should be rectified.

God Bless America

Because I think the audience for a completely unsubtle movie in which a dying Man and a teenage girl go on a killing spree murdering all those annoying people you experience in (pop) culture  (high school bitch, the God Hates Fags people, the audience at a TV talent show) would be fun.  Because it would make nice counter-programming to Harold and Maude.  Because the director, Bobcat Goldthwait, has an outstanding name.

Killer Joe

Because William Friedkin is still making movies and this one stars Matthew McConaughey in a morally dubious role, and there is just something magnetic about the guy when he’s playing interesting characters.  Because it’s set in Texas and I will not pass on an opportunity to watch Hot Texans doing Corrupt Texan Things.

In Another Country

Because Hong Sang-soo makes always original though not unproblematic films and this one has Isabelle Huppert and a rather great, classic Hong Sang-soo trailer that you can view here.

Holy Motors

Because it’s been described as “bonkers” and Kylie Minogue appears and I just love these crazy festival movies that seem to be designed to push all the festival controversy buttons.  Because I’ve just started getting into Denis Lavant.  Because I love Lavant and Carax’s effort in Tokyo! and which you can view in the next post.

Once Upon A Time In America

Because nothing would reaffirm my sometimes waning passion for cinema than spending 4 hours with Sergio Leone’s gangster epic.

Watching ‘Somewhere’ and I should be hating it but there’s just something about the way Coppola fetishes ennui: like, we all experience it, so it might as well be while you’re at the Chateau Marmont doing drugs and having sex and playing video games and driving through LA right?  I mean if you’re gonna do ennui you might as well do it properly, and Stephen Dorff seems to do it properly in ‘Somewhere’.  View high resolution

Watching ‘Somewhere’ and I should be hating it but there’s just something about the way Coppola fetishes ennui: like, we all experience it, so it might as well be while you’re at the Chateau Marmont doing drugs and having sex and playing video games and driving through LA right?  I mean if you’re gonna do ennui you might as well do it properly, and Stephen Dorff seems to do it properly in ‘Somewhere’. 

I wrote something on what The Graduate says about twenty-something life here, check it out! View high resolution

I wrote something on what The Graduate says about twenty-something life here, check it out!

Brief Thoughts on Architecture and Cinema and Everything Else

Space has a curious relationship with film criticism.  Much has been made of the viewer’s status as ‘voyeur’, but, as Giullana Bruno argues in ‘Site Seeing: The Cine City’, much less is made of our simultaneous status as ‘voyageurs’.  For in film we don’t merely look onto scenes, we look through them.  The camera, after all, is not static: it moves through space, and with it we do too.  But what of cinema’s relationship with that major delineator of space, architecture?  Below, I briefly consider two very different cinematic takes on our urban environments.

Man With a Movie Camera, Sergei Eisenstein’s much discussed 1929 film, starts with the titular man and his camera.  The very next scene takes us inside a movie theatre.  As the projectionist sets up in the projection room, hordes of people enter the space.  A live orchestra begin to play as their film, and our film, begin.  We see a series of shots of the city awakening: newborns in their cribs, homeless people waking up, empty streets being cleaned.  The daily birth of the city is equated with no less than the birth of children.  In fact, Eisenstein constructs the city’s rhythm out of the rhythm of the movie theatre that is the beginning of the film’s setting.  As Bruno puts it, “the life of architecture is the life of (the city’s) residents”.  Distinct parallels are not only being drawn between the city’s architecture and its inhabitants, but between the urban environment and the cinema itself.  Eisenstein did say, after all, that the closest form of art to cinema is not theatre or photography, but architecture.

The city space of Man With a Movie Camera is thus constructed out of the intersection of 3 distinct areas, all of equal importance: the camera, the architecture, and the people.  But what if you take the latter element out of the equation?

Michelangelo Antonioni does just that in the famed ending to his L’Eclisse (1962).  For the vast majority of the film’s running time, we follow a stylishly shot, if somewhat conventional, love story between the ennui-ridden Vittoria and her polar opposite in many ways, Piero.  Yet the film’s final sequence is something altogether different: the film stops following the protagonists, replacing their story with various vaguely ominous shots of the fascistic architecture of their Roman suburb.  Here the urban environment continues to exist absent of the human agency we have been following.  The indifference of the city to its inhabitants is a profoundly disturbing thought.  

Not only that, but the indifference to the city from the constant allusions to nuclear catastrophe (the newspaper headline, the mushroom shaped building) is even more so.  Antonioni underscores the fragility of Eisenstein’s whole exercise: the camera, the architecture, the inhabitants: none of these things will matter in the face of the catastrophe that will, one day, inevitably befall us all.