I first heard about The Beaver, when it won first place on the 2008 Black List, an annual industry round-up of the best unproduced scripts (it's important to note that the script for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is #11 on that list... and was one of the best scripts of 2009). It came up again when Jodie Foster became the director of it and cast Mel Gibson as the lead. Then, after production had wrapped in the summer of 2010, the audio tapes of Mel calling his wife terrible names (and other things) came out and the film's release (scheduled for the fall of 2010) was held indefinitely. So finally it's out in theaters (well, sorta... I think it was on 22 screens across the country).
The Beaver is a terrible movie, having nothing to do with Mel Gibson being an anti-Semitic bigot. It has what is actually one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time that takes shocking, gonzo steps as a way of avoiding banality. It has no structure and the premise, based on a quick read of the psychology Wikipedia entry, is bizarrely naive about what it's getting at. That this movie was ever produced is a testament to how stupid and navel-gazing the movie industry is.
Walter (Gibson) is a massively depressed businessman who also seems to suffer with with mania and schizophrenia. One day, while on a drinking and suicide bender, he finds a stuffed beaver puppet in a dumpster, puts it in his hand and begins to talk to himself in a cockney accent. This externalized superego then gets Walter to go back home, after his wife (Jodie Foster) has kicked him out, and make amends with her and his two sons. His older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), is a high school outcast who writes papers for his classmates for cash. He hates his father and is trying to do anything in his power to not be like him.
At some point, Porter is contacted by the school valedictorian, Norah (Jennifer Lawrence), to write her valedictory address. He agrees and comes back to her with an offensive piece about how sad she is that her brother overdosed on drugs. Oh - and she likes to paint graffiti, but isn't allowed to do that because her mother doesn't want her to. Are you bored yet? Remember how this was a about a guy who talks with a puppet? Right.
It's a real surprise to me how much of this story is not about Walter and the eponymous puppet. Almost half of the film is about Porter, a secondary character, and about half of that story (a quarter of the film) is about Norah, a tertiary character. I think the idea is that the beaver is for Walter what Norah and Porter are for one another, that is some sort of external force that guides their struggles. The problem is that this simple nugget of an idea is so convoluted that it's almost totally lost. For most of the third act, there is no Walter and there is no beaver. This is stupid.
One amazing thing about the script, by Kyle Killen, is that it seems to be about psychology on the surface (it's about a crazy guy and it's pretty clear that the writer has some idea of what an id, and ego and a superego are), but it's not a very deep examination of anything psychological at all. We see that Walter goes to shrinks in the opening montage (and apparently lays in the couch at one), but he then comes up with the beaver "cure" on his own without any medical guidance (as if the treatment of depression was somehow easy and good for a punchline). After not fundamentally improving with the help of the puppet, he hurts himself in a pretty grizzly way, and then is checked into a psych hospital, medicated, treated off-screen and healed (well, it's a happy ending, so the idea is that he's on his way to recovery). The film isn't really critical of psychology, but it deals with it so lightly that it becomes either a joke or a proxy for "all that's wrong in our world". This is stupid too.
Gibson's performance is much more subdued than he is normally. It's certainly showy - he's really playing a blank cypher for a cockney beaver - but it's not as loud and crazy as he is frequently and he doesn't chew up too much of the set. Foster's direction is fine, if unnoticeable, but I give her as much blame for the terrible structure and script as Killen gets. How on earth could she have let this movie be made with this script?
Hollywood loves movies about shrinks - because everyone in Hollywood is in therapy. Hollywood is not filled with smart people, however. This is the perfect storm of those two things. Somehow people read this script, saw it was a gonzo take on psychotherapy/psychiatry and decided that it was a winner. Nobody ever had the depth of interest or knowledge to pick out the interesting nut of an idea and re-write it. This could have been an interesting and hard-hitting film. Instead it's a joke and is terrible.
Stars: 1 of 4
6 Mayıs 2011 Cuma
THOR: The Film Babble Blog Review
THOR (Dir. Kenneth Branaugh, 2011)
(Warning: This review may contain Spoilers!)
Summer doesn't officially begin until late June, but the summer movie season began last week with the opening of the franchise front-runner FAST FIVE. However the season doesn't really feel like it's underway until a big-ass superhero flick swoops in, so today we get us the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: THOR.
Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is a cocky (and somewhat douchey) Norse God who lives in the splendiforic golden CGI-ed city of Asgard off in the heavens above, in another realm, or something.
Thor's father, the King of their realm, played with his patented gravely gravitas by Anthony Hopkins, is ready to let his son take the throne, but an attack by a gang of scaly skinned creepy creatures called Frost Giants throws that plan out of whack.
The Frost Giants steal the source of Asgard's power "the Casket of Ancient Winters." Defying their father, Thor and his brother (Tom Hiddleston) go after their frigid foes into their icy realm, along with their gung-ho troop of hearty warriors (Tadanobu Asano, Joshua Davis, Ray Stevenson, and Jaimie Alexander).
A busy and bombarding battle goes down, which doesn't please Hopkins so he banishes his son to Earth, and throws his hammer of power down there with him.
It then becomes a bit of a fish out of water story with Thor meeting up with a trio of scientific researchers in a desert in New Mexico where he crash lands - Natalie Portman (much more animated than in YOUR HIGHNESS), a befuddled Stellan Skarsgård, and the wise-cracking Kat Dennings - who take him in as they just happen to be up on Nordic mythology.
Thor's predicament is that he has to fight through a military instillation that has surrounded his mighty hammer in the desert since, like the Arthurian legend, it can not be removed by just anyone.
The film gets bogged down in noisy fight scenes and impenetrable exposition that I couldn't follow recognize the weight of, but since I don't know the comic from which this is based, that stuff may mean a lot more to the hardcore. I mean, I get that Thor must fight his brother Hiddleston, who turns out to be half Frost Giant I guess, and take on a giant destructive robot in order to restore the kingdom of Asgard and awaken his father from some deep sparkling golden slumber, I think.
It was hard to follow or care about this because Hemsworth has little charisma or believability in the role, and his being paired with Portman is forced and fairly chemistry-less.
Those elements don't completely cripple THOR, because on the surface it's a serviceable super hero movie with plenty of fast paced action that folks just wanting mindless thrills will likely go for.
It's also fun to see how the Marvel movies are building what my fellow local entertainment writer friend Zack Smith calls an "uber continuity" with Clark Gregg reprising his role as Agent Coulson from IRON MAN 1 & 2, a cameo by Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, and an after the end-credits scene, which I won't spoil, but will just say that it foreshadows events to come in THE AVENGERS, so stay until the very end.
I was very surprised to see that this was directed by Kenneth Branaugh because in retrospect except for some nuanced acting from a few members of the cast, there is precious little in this assembly line formula that could be reasonably attributed to him.
While I normally avoid 3-D, I didn't have a choice with the advance screening I saw of this. I didn't get a headache, but apart from a few scattered arresting visuals, the 3-D added very little.
THOR is bombastic and in your face enough without such enhancement, but I bet kids of all ages will eat it up in whatever format.
More later...
3 Mayıs 2011 Salı
Le Quattro Volte (Tuesday, May 3, 2011) (27)
Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is a beautiful and challenging film. It has a light narrative structure, but feels more like an experimental art piece than anything particularly plot-driven. It relies entirely on the beautiful cinematography of Andrea Locatelli, employing no score and no dialogue. The sound we hear is created by the natural situations we witness: a truck driving up a hill, the bells of a herd of goats as well as their collective bleating, a crowd of people getting together in a village square for a celebration. This is a very slow-moving film, but is quite lyrical and interesting.
It opens with an old goat herder walking with his sheep in the hills in rural Italy. He has a terrible cough and stops his work to hack away for awhile. When he gets home, he mixes an unknown substance into a glass of water. The next day as he makes his rounds in the village delivering milk he picks up a pack of dust from the church after a nun has blessed it (this dust is what he drank in the water the night before). Later we follow a goat kid from its birth to its first trip out with the flock into the hills, where it gets separated from the group because it can't keep up. Finally we see the villagers cut a tall tree and put it up in the square for a celebration. The tree is taken down and burned to make charcoal.
These little episodes all deal with the cycle of life and relative life-spans for each kind of being (a man, an animal and a tree). It seems the title (The Four Times, in English) refers to a theory of Pythagoras that life has four stages from beginning to end: human, animal, plant and mineral. I have to admit, I caught the four parts, but it's still rather cryptic (and had to look up the meaning after I saw the film... I'm a cheater).
I was struck a few times over the course of the picture about how much it reminded me of some of the more exotic fare of Tarkovsky, notably his Solaris from 1972. Clearly that is a story mostly set in space, but it deals with ontology in an interesting, abstract way. This connection was particularly clear to me with the way Frammartino uses shots of natural textures to fill the screen expressively between more narrative moments. Even though it is stylistically very different from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi (there's no music, the shots don't have much movement in them at all), they both share a similar poetic quality.
This is not an easy film, but it is interesting and beautiful. It's not often a film can capture your attention for 88 minutes without nearly any sound. This one does.
Stars: 3 of 4
It opens with an old goat herder walking with his sheep in the hills in rural Italy. He has a terrible cough and stops his work to hack away for awhile. When he gets home, he mixes an unknown substance into a glass of water. The next day as he makes his rounds in the village delivering milk he picks up a pack of dust from the church after a nun has blessed it (this dust is what he drank in the water the night before). Later we follow a goat kid from its birth to its first trip out with the flock into the hills, where it gets separated from the group because it can't keep up. Finally we see the villagers cut a tall tree and put it up in the square for a celebration. The tree is taken down and burned to make charcoal.
These little episodes all deal with the cycle of life and relative life-spans for each kind of being (a man, an animal and a tree). It seems the title (The Four Times, in English) refers to a theory of Pythagoras that life has four stages from beginning to end: human, animal, plant and mineral. I have to admit, I caught the four parts, but it's still rather cryptic (and had to look up the meaning after I saw the film... I'm a cheater).
I was struck a few times over the course of the picture about how much it reminded me of some of the more exotic fare of Tarkovsky, notably his Solaris from 1972. Clearly that is a story mostly set in space, but it deals with ontology in an interesting, abstract way. This connection was particularly clear to me with the way Frammartino uses shots of natural textures to fill the screen expressively between more narrative moments. Even though it is stylistically very different from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi (there's no music, the shots don't have much movement in them at all), they both share a similar poetic quality.
This is not an easy film, but it is interesting and beautiful. It's not often a film can capture your attention for 88 minutes without nearly any sound. This one does.
Stars: 3 of 4
DVD Review: SQUARE GROUPER
SQUARE GROUPER: THE GODFATHERS OF GANJA (Dir. Billy Corben, 2011)
I missed this when it was screened last month at Full Frame so I was happy to get a copy in the mail the day after the Festival.
“Square Grouper” is the "slang term for bales of marijuana thrown overboard or out of airplanes in South Florida in the 1970s and 1980s,” this documentary tells us up front. Then we are gently taken into this exploration of Florida marijuana smuggling during that era, by way of a folksy ballad theme song that serenades the opening credits.
The film is broken into 3 chapters – the first of which, "Part 1: Zion Coptic Church," deals with a Fundamentalist Christian sect in Florida that believed Ganja to be a sacred herb that brings them closer to God. They smuggled huge amounts of marijuana from Jamaica to their mansion (called a "luxury compound") in Star Island, Florida. Through newly shot interviews with former church members, neighbors, reporters, and Federal agents we learn how the sect was the target of a ginormous bust.
The second segment, "Part 2: Black Tuna Gang," concerns another Miami marijuana operation consisting of Robert Platshorn, who served the longest prison term for a non-violent marijuana offense in US history, his partner in crime Bobby Meinster, and gang accountant Howard Blumn. One of the funniest moments here is former FBI agent Harold Copus talking about getting a subsciption to "High Times" magazine so the agents could better follow the drug trade. A joint DEA-FBI outfit brought down the Black Tuna Gang, and the principle member's marriages were put to the test, with Platshorn's wife Lynne also doing jail-time. This segment has the most emotional power of the three.
The final chapter, "Part 3: Everglades City,” leaves Miami and heads to a small fishing town on Florida’s southwest coast in which “smuggling was a way of life” because the secret bayous and mangrove islands that can conceal transport activity. Just about everyone in town was involved in the operation and became very rich off the “sea weed” until, yep, the FBI and DEA swept in. This documentary benefits from its soundtrack largely scored by Spam Allstars' Andrew Yeomanson and the “Square Grouper” band with a few original compositions by director Corben.
The music compliments the material perfectly, and fits in nicely with a concluding cover of Jimmy Buffet’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” that Everglades City resident Lee “Leebo” Noble performs on guitar (Noble: “Even though Jimmy Buffett is a manatee-huggin’ son-of-a-bitch, we still like this song”). Meticulously crafted from ‘70s and ‘80s TV news footage, period photographs, newspaper headlines, and many recently shot interviews, the film may be slightly overstuffed, but the juiciness of the stories is so rich, and the plain-spoken charm of most of the participants that it makes for supreme info-tainment.
In the words of a stoner: SQUARE GROUPER is killer shit.
SQUARE GROUPER is now available on DVD. According to the Netflix website it will be available streaming soon.
More later...
I missed this when it was screened last month at Full Frame so I was happy to get a copy in the mail the day after the Festival.
“Square Grouper” is the "slang term for bales of marijuana thrown overboard or out of airplanes in South Florida in the 1970s and 1980s,” this documentary tells us up front. Then we are gently taken into this exploration of Florida marijuana smuggling during that era, by way of a folksy ballad theme song that serenades the opening credits.
The film is broken into 3 chapters – the first of which, "Part 1: Zion Coptic Church," deals with a Fundamentalist Christian sect in Florida that believed Ganja to be a sacred herb that brings them closer to God. They smuggled huge amounts of marijuana from Jamaica to their mansion (called a "luxury compound") in Star Island, Florida. Through newly shot interviews with former church members, neighbors, reporters, and Federal agents we learn how the sect was the target of a ginormous bust.
The second segment, "Part 2: Black Tuna Gang," concerns another Miami marijuana operation consisting of Robert Platshorn, who served the longest prison term for a non-violent marijuana offense in US history, his partner in crime Bobby Meinster, and gang accountant Howard Blumn. One of the funniest moments here is former FBI agent Harold Copus talking about getting a subsciption to "High Times" magazine so the agents could better follow the drug trade. A joint DEA-FBI outfit brought down the Black Tuna Gang, and the principle member's marriages were put to the test, with Platshorn's wife Lynne also doing jail-time. This segment has the most emotional power of the three.
The final chapter, "Part 3: Everglades City,” leaves Miami and heads to a small fishing town on Florida’s southwest coast in which “smuggling was a way of life” because the secret bayous and mangrove islands that can conceal transport activity. Just about everyone in town was involved in the operation and became very rich off the “sea weed” until, yep, the FBI and DEA swept in. This documentary benefits from its soundtrack largely scored by Spam Allstars' Andrew Yeomanson and the “Square Grouper” band with a few original compositions by director Corben.
The music compliments the material perfectly, and fits in nicely with a concluding cover of Jimmy Buffet’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty” that Everglades City resident Lee “Leebo” Noble performs on guitar (Noble: “Even though Jimmy Buffett is a manatee-huggin’ son-of-a-bitch, we still like this song”). Meticulously crafted from ‘70s and ‘80s TV news footage, period photographs, newspaper headlines, and many recently shot interviews, the film may be slightly overstuffed, but the juiciness of the stories is so rich, and the plain-spoken charm of most of the participants that it makes for supreme info-tainment.
In the words of a stoner: SQUARE GROUPER is killer shit.
SQUARE GROUPER is now available on DVD. According to the Netflix website it will be available streaming soon.
More later...
29 Nisan 2011 Cuma
Cave of Forgotten Dreams- 3D (Friday, April 29, 2011) (26)
On its surface, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a documentary about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in South-western France and the spectacular paintings/drawings on the walls. Herzog and and a small crew were granted rare access to the cave to shoot a movie... so he made a documentary in 3D, of course! He shows amazing shots of the drawings, speaks to scientists about the age of the cave and the drawings and what we know or can speculate about the people who might have created them.
Of course nothing as as simple as it seems with Herzog, a madman, genius and life-long rule-breaker. This film really is an examination of human perception, comprehension and existence as well as a post-modern evaluation of the filmic form and our experience with movies.
Clearly the most gaudy part of this formal inquiry is the fact that it is a documentary (probably the least profitable cinematic form) made in 3D (probably the most expensive, showiest format). At some level you can understand that if you get the access to the cave that Herzog got, it only makes sense to make as much with it as you can. We viewers will never get to visit the cave ourselves (access is extremely limited to a few scientists each year), so we should be able to see it in a hyper-realistic format like 3D.
But this begs the question: What is a a hyper-realistic format? Would any method be more naturalistic than this? Is anything that is shot on film and projected onto a screen (or played digitally) really going to be like it is in the world, or is our understanding of the verisimilitude of the style overstated? I think Herzog is showing us here that what we perceive to be a given reality is frequently far from the truth.
Similarly our understanding of the paintings and the people who created them is never going to be complete and, in the end, is only guess work, despite a tremendous amount of time and effort spent researching them. We will never know if what appears to be an altar with a bear skull on it is really an altar or just a random thing that one person 30,000 years ago might have done done day for no particular reason. Formality, here, is a haphazard thing and not something we should put too much stock in.
This is underlined, I think, at a moment when two scientists are speaking about one wall where a person put a series of hand-prints on the wall. We see the two women standing in the foreground and see the wall they're talking about in the distance. As the 3D was processed in post-production from a 2D print (as opposed to being shot in 3D with multiple cameras), part of the area between the women (that is in the background) that surrounds their silhouettes is partially brought to the foreground.
One could see this as a technical mistake, but I'm not sure Herzog would leave something as obvious in the film. I think he's showing us that this 3D view is not what it seems; it is as much a construction as the scientific theories that these women are talking about are. Everything we see in the world is affected by our own view of the world. The scientists who are researching this cave are looking at it from a 20th/21st Century point of view. They are in the space themselves with their own human psychology changing their hypotheses. Nothing is pure or exact.
At one point a scientist working on mapping all the markings on the walls says that after spending a few consecutive days in the cave looking at drawings of lions, he went home and dreamed about lions that night. Herzog asked him if he dreamed about the lion drawings from the cave or about real lions that he'd seen on TV or in person. The man responds, "both". This is a very important moment because what the man is describing is exactly what happens when you watch a movie. At some point in the experience, you stop noticing you are watching on a screen and your mind goes "into" the picture. The mediation vanishes and you are somehow not in the theater (or living room), but a direct witness of what you're watching.
The documentary form is a kind of mediation as well and Herzog reminds us over and over again that as much as we can study the cave paintings, we will never know what the people who made them meant or thought. There are a lot of plays with documentary formalism and he breaks several rules of technique. Herzog narrates the film, but is also a character in it (as he's done with many of his documentaries), you see his crew in many of the shots and he even says to us directly that they would be there and he speaks of the camera they use to shoot (I don't know for sure, but I think it was a standard HD camera that was later converted to 3D). All of these things are normally cut out of documentaries to make them seem more "pure", but Herzog leaves them in. He's reminding us that these things get between us and the so-called "reality" of the cave - the same way the great distance of time gets between us and the cave painters.
In another sequence Herzog shows two drawings that are next to one another and says that they were actually painted more than 5000 years apart. (The drawings are about 30,000 years old and the cave has been sealed by a rock slide at the entrance for more than 10,000 years.) He makes a comment about how the people who lived at the time the paintings were done had a different idea of the passage of time than we do. Time gets compressed for us modern people over the great span of years. After that much distance, we can only imagine what their "forgotten dreams" were - assuming they had any in the first place.
There is still a stunning proximity to these drawings and to the time and place where they were painted. Some of the drawings show now-extinct animals, like mammoths, cave lions and cave bears when they lived in what is now called Europe. It is really stunning to consider that these beings we learned about in paleontology class, always distant fantasies, honestly roamed the world at the same time as human species. Suddenly these things don't seem so far away, suddenly the things we have imagined about these species comes alive. Our dreams and imagination, the opposite of mediation, become science.
For me, this is a logical pair to Herzog's 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, another film ostensibly about science, but really about human existence and the lack of knowledge we really have about our world and ourselves. These films can be seen on a very straight-forward level, as movies about specific places (Antarctica or the Chauvet Cave), but they can also been seen at deeper, more existential levels.
Humans are creative beings, we make paintings and movies, but the reasons for doing those things is not always clear when they are made and even less clear as our time passes. This film will become like the paintings, a totem from a forgotten moment of expression. We shouldn't put too much importance on it.
In Herzog's view, the world is generally a thankless, horrible place where misery is around every corner. For him, these drawings are as much about the futility of creativity, due to its formal elements and its necessary contextual relevance, as they are about the human hope for documenting the past and leaving something for the future. We have no idea who these people are and it is rather silly to get into trying to understand them, but the study of these people itself is an interesting thing to examine inasmuch as it reflects on us and our view of our own humanity.
Stars: 4 of 4
Of course nothing as as simple as it seems with Herzog, a madman, genius and life-long rule-breaker. This film really is an examination of human perception, comprehension and existence as well as a post-modern evaluation of the filmic form and our experience with movies.
Clearly the most gaudy part of this formal inquiry is the fact that it is a documentary (probably the least profitable cinematic form) made in 3D (probably the most expensive, showiest format). At some level you can understand that if you get the access to the cave that Herzog got, it only makes sense to make as much with it as you can. We viewers will never get to visit the cave ourselves (access is extremely limited to a few scientists each year), so we should be able to see it in a hyper-realistic format like 3D.
But this begs the question: What is a a hyper-realistic format? Would any method be more naturalistic than this? Is anything that is shot on film and projected onto a screen (or played digitally) really going to be like it is in the world, or is our understanding of the verisimilitude of the style overstated? I think Herzog is showing us here that what we perceive to be a given reality is frequently far from the truth.
Similarly our understanding of the paintings and the people who created them is never going to be complete and, in the end, is only guess work, despite a tremendous amount of time and effort spent researching them. We will never know if what appears to be an altar with a bear skull on it is really an altar or just a random thing that one person 30,000 years ago might have done done day for no particular reason. Formality, here, is a haphazard thing and not something we should put too much stock in.
This is underlined, I think, at a moment when two scientists are speaking about one wall where a person put a series of hand-prints on the wall. We see the two women standing in the foreground and see the wall they're talking about in the distance. As the 3D was processed in post-production from a 2D print (as opposed to being shot in 3D with multiple cameras), part of the area between the women (that is in the background) that surrounds their silhouettes is partially brought to the foreground.
One could see this as a technical mistake, but I'm not sure Herzog would leave something as obvious in the film. I think he's showing us that this 3D view is not what it seems; it is as much a construction as the scientific theories that these women are talking about are. Everything we see in the world is affected by our own view of the world. The scientists who are researching this cave are looking at it from a 20th/21st Century point of view. They are in the space themselves with their own human psychology changing their hypotheses. Nothing is pure or exact.
At one point a scientist working on mapping all the markings on the walls says that after spending a few consecutive days in the cave looking at drawings of lions, he went home and dreamed about lions that night. Herzog asked him if he dreamed about the lion drawings from the cave or about real lions that he'd seen on TV or in person. The man responds, "both". This is a very important moment because what the man is describing is exactly what happens when you watch a movie. At some point in the experience, you stop noticing you are watching on a screen and your mind goes "into" the picture. The mediation vanishes and you are somehow not in the theater (or living room), but a direct witness of what you're watching.
The documentary form is a kind of mediation as well and Herzog reminds us over and over again that as much as we can study the cave paintings, we will never know what the people who made them meant or thought. There are a lot of plays with documentary formalism and he breaks several rules of technique. Herzog narrates the film, but is also a character in it (as he's done with many of his documentaries), you see his crew in many of the shots and he even says to us directly that they would be there and he speaks of the camera they use to shoot (I don't know for sure, but I think it was a standard HD camera that was later converted to 3D). All of these things are normally cut out of documentaries to make them seem more "pure", but Herzog leaves them in. He's reminding us that these things get between us and the so-called "reality" of the cave - the same way the great distance of time gets between us and the cave painters.
In another sequence Herzog shows two drawings that are next to one another and says that they were actually painted more than 5000 years apart. (The drawings are about 30,000 years old and the cave has been sealed by a rock slide at the entrance for more than 10,000 years.) He makes a comment about how the people who lived at the time the paintings were done had a different idea of the passage of time than we do. Time gets compressed for us modern people over the great span of years. After that much distance, we can only imagine what their "forgotten dreams" were - assuming they had any in the first place.
There is still a stunning proximity to these drawings and to the time and place where they were painted. Some of the drawings show now-extinct animals, like mammoths, cave lions and cave bears when they lived in what is now called Europe. It is really stunning to consider that these beings we learned about in paleontology class, always distant fantasies, honestly roamed the world at the same time as human species. Suddenly these things don't seem so far away, suddenly the things we have imagined about these species comes alive. Our dreams and imagination, the opposite of mediation, become science.
For me, this is a logical pair to Herzog's 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, another film ostensibly about science, but really about human existence and the lack of knowledge we really have about our world and ourselves. These films can be seen on a very straight-forward level, as movies about specific places (Antarctica or the Chauvet Cave), but they can also been seen at deeper, more existential levels.
Humans are creative beings, we make paintings and movies, but the reasons for doing those things is not always clear when they are made and even less clear as our time passes. This film will become like the paintings, a totem from a forgotten moment of expression. We shouldn't put too much importance on it.
In Herzog's view, the world is generally a thankless, horrible place where misery is around every corner. For him, these drawings are as much about the futility of creativity, due to its formal elements and its necessary contextual relevance, as they are about the human hope for documenting the past and leaving something for the future. We have no idea who these people are and it is rather silly to get into trying to understand them, but the study of these people itself is an interesting thing to examine inasmuch as it reflects on us and our view of our own humanity.
Stars: 4 of 4
26 Nisan 2011 Salı
OF GODS AND MEN: The Film Babble Blog Review
The most stirring scene of this immaculately affecting French film involves a group of Trappist monks singing towards a stained glass window in their Algerian monastery as an armed helicopter hovers above.
Granted, it takes a while to get there as this film is a real slow burner. We follow these monks, led by Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale, through their serene daily routines for a long tranquil stretch before a bunch of Islamic terrorists start taking over the terrain.
The monks debate on whether they should stay or go - some believing they should uphold their sacred ground, and some thinking to stay would be "collective suicide."
Based on a true story from 1996, OF GODS AND MEN beautifully builds to its profoundly powerful ending with a series of carefully crafted scenes. In one such scene, the monks drink wine to Tchaikosky's "Swan Lake" and enjoy a moment of peace as doom looms nearer.
It's so quiet and poetic a film, due to the solid cinematography of Caroline Champetier and the abundance of holy chants throughout the film, that when the brief instances of violence occur they really strike you.
Beauvois has made a spare yet intensely spiritual film that pays touching tribute to these men of faith, illuminating their final days sans sappy sentiment.
It shows that as often as the light can be salvation, it can also be the cold hard light of day. This film's brave accomplishment is that it's straight with us about that.
More later...
The Robber (Tuesday, April 26, 2011) (25)
I hate movies that open with titles saying that they are based on true events. Most things that happen to most people are really dull and mundane and the idea of something being "ripped from the headlines" is overstated. After all, film is a creative art and something that has many hands touching it. A representation of a real event is no more real than a fantasy film of other wolds and unknown sciences. I see such caveats as a shield beneath which bad writers and directors generally hide. It's easy for someone to say, "well, you didn't like that section, but that's how it really happened, so you can't complain." This is stupid. Regardless of the genesis of a story, it has to be compelling and interesting to viewers. The Robber is based on a true story, but is neither compelling nor interesting. It's one of the dullest films I've seen in awhile and totally unoriginal.
This true story is about Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), who is serving time in jail for a botched bank robbery and is also an avid runner and marathoner. When he gets out of jail he begins training as a runner and stealing cars and robbing banks. He surprises everyone by winning the Vienna Marathon as an amateur (not one of those guys who starts ahead of the pack) and then goes off an robs another bank.
He continues to train and rob banks (and carjack people to get getaway vehicles). He moves in with a social worker who he knows from the past and they begin a torrid affair. She catches on to his dealings but loves him so much that she helps him get away (several times). If he's caught, he escapes... and, of course, he's really good at running away from cops (get it?!).
This film is very... Austrian. It's absolutely humorless, there's a very clinical, cold sex scene (the social worker girlfriend, played by Franziska Weisz is actually quite comely), it plods along with no twists or surprises, it has no score and aside from a washed-out palette, it has no flashy visual/optical techniques. Writer/director Benjamin Heisenberg actually has one very nice shot as he shows the beginning of an ultramarathon from a great distance. All you see is a small village in darkness in the middle of the night, and slowly a line of headlamps the runners are wearing coming up the road.
Lust is good, but the character is barely two-dimensional. He has only two interests in life: running and bank robbing. He seems compelled to rob banks the way an alcoholic is compelled to drink. It's something he does and he doesn't really look to stop doing it. He never shows remorse or guilt, gets upset with the girl when she discovers him and bolts. There's nothing in this film to grab a hold of. The story is so dispassionate that it's hard to feel anything for any of the characters really.
I've always thought of movies about thieves to be some of the most fun and romantic. Bresson's Pickpocket, Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven are all fun to watch (and learn from) and simple, beautiful love stories (well, less so with O11, but there's that thing between Clooney and Roberts). This is not really a romance at all - it's just an unfeeling look at what one guy did at some point in time in Austria. You would get more emotion out of a newspaper article about the guy.
It's a totally boring, cold story that doesn't give any perspective into a greater human context, let alone Johannes's character. This film is a binary sketch of some events that once happened. Who cares?
Stars: 1 of 4
This true story is about Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), who is serving time in jail for a botched bank robbery and is also an avid runner and marathoner. When he gets out of jail he begins training as a runner and stealing cars and robbing banks. He surprises everyone by winning the Vienna Marathon as an amateur (not one of those guys who starts ahead of the pack) and then goes off an robs another bank.
He continues to train and rob banks (and carjack people to get getaway vehicles). He moves in with a social worker who he knows from the past and they begin a torrid affair. She catches on to his dealings but loves him so much that she helps him get away (several times). If he's caught, he escapes... and, of course, he's really good at running away from cops (get it?!).
This film is very... Austrian. It's absolutely humorless, there's a very clinical, cold sex scene (the social worker girlfriend, played by Franziska Weisz is actually quite comely), it plods along with no twists or surprises, it has no score and aside from a washed-out palette, it has no flashy visual/optical techniques. Writer/director Benjamin Heisenberg actually has one very nice shot as he shows the beginning of an ultramarathon from a great distance. All you see is a small village in darkness in the middle of the night, and slowly a line of headlamps the runners are wearing coming up the road.
Lust is good, but the character is barely two-dimensional. He has only two interests in life: running and bank robbing. He seems compelled to rob banks the way an alcoholic is compelled to drink. It's something he does and he doesn't really look to stop doing it. He never shows remorse or guilt, gets upset with the girl when she discovers him and bolts. There's nothing in this film to grab a hold of. The story is so dispassionate that it's hard to feel anything for any of the characters really.
I've always thought of movies about thieves to be some of the most fun and romantic. Bresson's Pickpocket, Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven are all fun to watch (and learn from) and simple, beautiful love stories (well, less so with O11, but there's that thing between Clooney and Roberts). This is not really a romance at all - it's just an unfeeling look at what one guy did at some point in time in Austria. You would get more emotion out of a newspaper article about the guy.
It's a totally boring, cold story that doesn't give any perspective into a greater human context, let alone Johannes's character. This film is a binary sketch of some events that once happened. Who cares?
Stars: 1 of 4
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