Review pages

Obviously I need to re-phrase the "I need your drafts" post from last week.

Your Xmas bonuses are dependent on me getting them very very soon.

Tom and Niki have provided theirs but as for the rest of you.....

Zilch.

Kendall responded by saying she was too busy watching Up over and over again for 13 days.

S

Tangy No Garlic

There is nothing you can write that accurately summarizes the experience of enduring Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control. It's aimless and yet seems to be heading somewhere, pointless and yet contemplative (for some weird reason, I kept wondering if we had any dill pickles left in the fridge. I didn't want any, I just wanted to know that if I did, they were there), beautiful yet vapid, vinegary and yet crisp. I regret the 116 minutes it took to watch it and yet I'm not unhappy that I've seen it. It's the cinematic equivalent of setting your clock ahead two hours. I broke for a smoke about an hour in and checked the fridge for any Bick's garlic baby dills, but couldn't see any. I was almost certain we'd picked some up a couple of weeks back. One of the small skinny jars. It's a big fridge.... maybe too big.

The pickle mystery unsolved, I returned to the film and rejoined the stoic Isaach De Bankole on his silent Spanish travelogue. He was getting another secret message in a matchbox, this time from John Hurt. Strange, pickles are just little cucumbers and yet I've only even seen the bigger variety, never the little guys. Do they sell those little bastards I wonder? Bankole changes his cool suit whenever he gets to a new station. They're kinda like vegetable veal when you think about it – tiny baby cucumbers. It's a little sad. We assume the Spanish journey will end with an assassination or something like that. By the time the naked girl is dead, I'm driven mad with trying to remember what might have happened to that jar of Bicks.

I murmured out loud whether they might be in the pantry. Donna stirs and asks me what I'd said.

“Nothing.... I'll be right back”. I jump up and scamper down to check the pantry.

There they were! Behind the olive oil. I bring it down and note that the label says they're “Tangy, No Garlic”

Fuck...... I hate Tangy No Garlic. At least they're baby dills and not those giant fuckers.

I race back upstairs to rejoin the movie and arrive just in time for Bill Murray...... I lean over and ask Donna if she meant to get Tangy No Garlic pickles.

She just looks at me. “What?!? she says ...a little annoyed.

I mention that I much prefer the garlic ones.

….Just so she knows for next time.

Bill gets garroted.

Happy Birthday

to this life:

It is 24.

In space no one can hear you scream

The Review

Kids,

I was wondering how we were doing with our year-end reviews? If I could get a draft (it doesn't have to be perfect or complete, just to get us started on layout), that'd be helpful.

Email me what you've got.

S

The Girlfriend Experience

Centered around porn-star Sasha Grey as the ‘sophisticated’ high-end escort Chelsea, Soderbergh takes a look at wealthy young adults living frivolous and uncertain lives in Manhattan. Grey has been given a ton of love for her performance, but there has been a back-handed undertone of surprise in the critical responses, a sense that she is ‘great(..for a porn star)’. I think the film-makers and a few of the supporting cast members try and bolster her presence in the film and generate ideas about the escort business; at times this works, but in the end she comes across as ho-hum and bone-dry. At one point in the movie, a sleazy porn blogger writes a negative review of Chelsea’s talents, describing her as cold and clammy to the touch - and although it is set up as a low-handed blow, it isn’t hard to imagine as the truth. In fact, the film as a whole comes across as very cold - it’s focus isn’t on the complications or politics of sex/passion-as-job, but rather a surface commentary on an independent worker in the escort business. There are no sex scenes (aside from the killer last scene, where a Hasidic Jew gets off via a half naked hug) but rather a few long conversations spliced together. The topics center around the marketing of Chelsea’s services (trying to increase her ‘rate’ and make her website pop up on google) and the boundaries between practitioner and client (and how her boyfriend Chris (annoying as hell) fits into that dynamic). Soderburgh also throws in a few topical issues such as the McCain/Obama presidential election and the free-falling economy. A few scenes hit the mark, but even the best left me wanting more. For example, there is a recurring conversation between Chelsea and a middle-aged reporter having lunch during an ‘appointment’. The reporter asks a lot of personal and interesting questions, most of them regarding how emotions come into play while offering a great ‘girlfriend experience’. If Chelsea had articulated the answers to his questions, the scene would have been a real investigation into a world and mindset not often heard from - but Chelsea answers most of the questions curtly, if at all, making it clear that he is over-stepping his boundaries. I think the flaw of TGE is that Chelsea, and her gym-trainer boyfriend, are at their core pretty uninteresting people. All in all, Soderburgh crafted a great base on which to go into some really cool and untraveled spaces, but ultimately got whisky dick and only grazed the surface.

Redefining the Indie

Ink (2009)


I'm not sure if anyone else has caught Ink yet but be prepared to..... Christ, I don't know what to say.... be confounded?, stunned?, blown away? Imagine what the result might look like if lavish '90s smut director Andrew Blake (a director whose work I'm rather familiar with) was hired to remake Terry Gilliam's Brazil on a budget of $10,000 with summer stock actors and a camcorder and you start to get a sense of what Ink is. It's shot on DV, sporting such a distinctly pornography "look" that I expected everyone to take off their clothes and start boinking each other in soft-focus-super-slow-mo about 3 minutes in. At about the 5 minute mark (to that point disappointingly smut-free), I toyed with the idea of turning it off, but decided instead to stick it out for another 10 minutes. Somewhere during this opening 15 minutes, Ink hooked me and I found myself getting more and more engrossed by its completely unique visual style, until I could tear my eyes off it (much like Blake's seminal/semenal 1997 film, Unleashed, the Citizen Kane of porn, but that's a topic for another post).


Over the last 5 or 10 years, an “indie” picture has come to mean something quite different than it did before that. These days, they tend to be stylistically threadbare, dialogue-heavy, conversational pieces where earnest 20 and 30-somethings discuss their latest must-have iPhone apps, 12 oz. mocha-latte's and life with equal vigor, much like I imagine hanging out at Cherry Bomb might feel like. Ink director (and producer, writer, musical score composer, boom mic operator and in all likelihood the guy who bought pizza and beer during the shoot) Jamin Winans has taken the “indie” film, thrown it over a sofa and thoroughly violated it, a Sunshine Cleaning of a very different sort if you will. Ink redefines “indie” so completely that the old indie is now just “mainstream without superheroes”. What remains to be seen is if he can find an audience for what might be a completely new cinematic style and extend that vision to show what indies are truly capably of. Ink raises the bar in ways I didn't think was even possible anymore.


Instead of getting into the film's intricate plot complexities and utterly unique vision, I'd rather focus on how to “watch” Ink, because I think it's important. Firstly, you need to forgive its bare-budget cinematic veneer and instead consider just how mind-blowing the linkage between the plot and the visuals are. The look and cinematography of the film is pure genius. While it draws inspiration from the likes of Dark City, the aforementioned Brazil, and the Matrix re-imagined as a high school drama production, Ink maintains a visual palette all its own. Don't expect the effects to look like they do in The Watchmen, because they don't. The film drifts a little in the middle and borders on cloying when the good witch explains the rules of the dream world to the junior bimbette at the centre of the story. This is the nature of innovation; not everything works and you have to give a little more latitude to the film maker than we're use to.


Even with these qualifiers, Ink is a stunner, far from perfect but even further from conventional and that makes it worthy of attention. It's a late entry on my 2009 top ten, its inclusion based almost entirely on the sheer tenacity of Winan's vision. If you want to see something that you've never seen before, Ink is your movie. Prediction..... Kendall and Kris will hate it and Joe and Tom will love it, but it's so unusual, I could have that completely backwards. I'd love to hear some feedback on this one, unless you all hate it in which case you're all fired.


Sporgey

Waltz with Bashir

I was going to post my extended Ballast and Ink reviews tonight but noticed that Tom had just posted on 3 films so I'll wait until tomorrow and give his excellent posts some time on Page 1. Instead, I thought I'd add a very short review on Waltz with Bashir which I brought home for the 31st time to finally watch tonight

..... and then didn't.

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

The 1975 police homicide case of Randall Adams Vs David Harris conceals a compelling story. The investigation and consequential trial is recollected here by the concerned officers, lawyers and witnesses as well as the two defendants themselves, complete with conflicting statements. This is one dark film, essentially airing the justice system's mistreatment of the case. The events are depicted here using dynamic almost lyrical pacing and a twisting, tension bound structure. Mixing interviews, reconstructed scenes, filmic excerpts and the real documentary evidence from the case, no dark corners are left unexplored or questions left unasked. I've come to expect nothing less from documentary film-maker Errol Morris who always delivers us to new and strange places with the most satisfying of conclusions. Unafraid to cut away from the dialogue Morris tells a documentary like a master of storytelling would tell fiction. The Philip Glass orchestral score helps blur the line between documentary and drama without ever feeling exploitative or trivialising of the real events. A final blow is held onto until the final minutes when you realise, *BAM!* he's done it again. Amazing! This one is going to linger in my mind for days.

Helvetica (2007) & Objectified (2009)

Quick, grab your ironic Himmler spectacles and a latte! It's time for designers to rant in these, two similar documentaries from director Gary Hustwit. Helvetica looks at typography specifically focusing on the films eponymous typeface while Objectified takes a broader scope to product design.

Meditating on a typeface for an hour and a half sounds almost like a joke. An exercise in monotony. After all, this is the typeface you see at the hospital, on street signs and over the door of Urban Outfitters; the most prolific distributor of Toronto's hipster uniform. It's the wallpaper of the world and has never garnered a second thought from most of us. This is the cool thing about this film, it is uncovering things you never noticed were there. The real question is now you know, do you care?

Objectified clarifies the ideological stances of the design professional as we find ourselves at the inevitable destination of Apple inc. the holy grail of contemporary design and then god forbid, Ikea (Oh escapism!). It covers issues of sustainability and ethics through cars, mobile phones, chairs, toothbrushes, blah etc. The most enduring concept of all is simple and is that people need to demand design that works for them, as opposed to designs and products making them feel inadequate. Seems like common sense, but then again so does putting down your mobile phone whilst making public transactions and we know that doesn't happen.

If you really want to get into the spirit of things, the presentation of these films might optimistically be described as minimalist and functional. But a film isn't the same as in iPod is it? The truth is, so many 'talking heads' does get dry and the films real world references provide just enough illustration to lubricate you for the duration.

For design students these films will be a fun distillation of their industry and it gives everyone an interesting second take at the world we have created. For the most part though, I for one am just as happy taking most man-made objects for granted. The designers themselves say good design should just work and not be distracting. These films are so cold and whilst not being totally devoid of structure, there is not much to care about. This simple fact leaves them feeling less like celluloid cool and more like suddenly becoming aware of the cold clammy hand of consumer culture touching you inappropriately. And that I wouldn't recommend to anyone but the most devoted of fans.