We Live In Public. I thought it was some mockumentary like Paper Heart but with some stalking and pixelated visuals. Instead it transformed into a serious doc about the internet and this man Josh Harris the artist/geek/genius etc etc etc. I don't even know what to call him. It begins with the internet taking shape and Harris' investment into the future of video and chat on the internet. It seems too business oriented with stocks and companies fighting to develop this new project, but that's only the beginning. After about 20 minutes, it cuts to Josh, in the middle of a rave with tons of ladies and crazy installations surrounding this party. It turns out that Josh gains 80 million from his projects and he decides to take it to a new level. He builds the first hotel that is free (free living, free booze, free food) and constructs it so that every section has a camera and monitors. Everyone and everything is videotaped and viewed at the same time. With over 100 people living there it becomes too intense. There is more to the DVD but I rather not ruine it. I just keep cutting back to the weirdest images from the hotel. It comments on Facebook and Myspace and yes it's eerie but I was fully unable to turn it off as it's that facination of the gaze. The observer and observed in the same building in a constant circulation of feeding information. Mad creeps and yet a really interesting, well documented film. I suggest you watch it while someone watches you watch it while someone watches them watch you watch it and so on. It's kind of like the cam at the FB... you never know what's going to turn up.

Out!

Niki Diamonds (and Red Frog)

In My Skin (Dans Ma Peau) (2002)

I was completely blindsided by this film directed by and starring frequent Francois Ozon collaborator Marina de Van.  In My Skin is the story of Esther, recently promoted at work, and becoming more serious with her partner Vincent (played wonderfully by Lemming and Calvaire's Laurent Lucas).  After a mishap at a party where Esther cuts her leg, she slowly begins to become fascinated by the wound, gently prodding and picking at it and ultimately allowing it (and her new found pleasure derived from cutting herself) to consume her entirely.

A fascinating, bold, and at times very tough to watch film, In My Skin's success hinges on one thing - the believability of the lead performance and the empathy it commands.  Fortunately, de Van is quietly riveting, and not only is her descent into oblivion believable, it is tragic, horrifying, and, in a very strange way, beautiful.  De Van's Esther has the ability to completely and fearlessly let go, to allow her instincts and desires to complete her transformation from nervous stability to physical, emotional, and spiritual self-immolation; this, more so than any kind of physical hurt, is terrifying and awesome.  The idea that someone can willingly (or, arguably - and perhaps more frightening - unwillingly) sacrifice themselves to a feeling is at once simple and profound, and frankly, seductive.  I mean, we do it on a small scale everyday, give in to our cravings and desires, but not to the extent of obliterating your very existence in order to attain some form of total grace.

The film works on several layers: the first is straight up, Cronenbergian body horror.  I consider myself not very easily shocked - I've seen everything from Budd Dwyer's live televised suicide to 2 Girls 1 Cup (don't worry - I'm not linking to them.  You're all adults, and those curious know where to seek this stuff out) and pretty much a whole bunch of sick, twisted shit in between that has often left me despising myself for being a part of the same species that can create such things.  However, there were moments in In My Skin that truly made me squirm, but not in a sensationalistic sense.  See the "violence" here is never gratuitous, and is in fact necessary for the story to play out the way it does.  De Van treats the often gruesome visual details of Esther's affliction with a mix of poignancy and the sense that Esther is an stranger in her own skin, and cannot fathom what this alien tissue is.  In this way, In My Skin owes a huge debt to the the slow burn psychological nosedive of Polanski's Repulsion, and indeed, Esther and Catherine Deneuve's Carol undergo very similar meltdowns, though Esther's is obviously much more graphic.

Another reading of the film is to see it as an addiction parable.  This is an obvious one, and my earlier mention of the horror and odd beauty of someone allowing themselves to be utterly consumed is an idea that is often explored in more literal translations, i.e. the typical "drug movie".  However, even that has become a hackneyed film trope and these days drug movies are no longer transgressive and fearless, they are de rigueur.  By removing references to drugs/alcohol/sex/texting, de Van reconfigures the viewer's experience.  We no longer overlook the addiction itself, because the addiction is the film; the film is the addiction.  By making the viewer focus on the ghastly goings-on as an externalized force, he is not allowed to forget, and is constantly being reminded that this is indeed what addiction is, this living nightmare of the soul betraying the body is very literally right in front of our eyes.

Esther uses the mutilation to escape or transcend the banality and growing pressures of her "real" world, and the deeper she crawls inside herself, and becomes more and more detached from the society around her, her externalized stigmata become increasingly brutal, until she finds herself stripping and consuming her own flesh.  In order to feel anything, she must destroy herself; an interesting philosophical paradox, and one suggestive of the image and idea of the Ouroboros, a kind of cyclical self-destruction that brings emotional transcendence and renewal.

There is no real resolution or consideration of those left in Esther's wake; in many ways, In My Skin is sort of an anti-slasher, where the violence and hurt is self-inflicted and is limited entirely to one person.  The final shot is haunting and elegiac, and will be fused to your retina for awhile, in much the same way that the final moments of Martyrs were.  In My Skin is a powerful, provocative, punishing work that has easily jumped into my top five horror films from the last decade.  A difficult, emotional, and ultimately very rewarding watch.

Bronson and Why Can't They Get Neo-Noir Right?

A couple of days detour into newer releases had Give 'Em Hell Malone and Bronson on tap last night.

Bronson was a treat. I first heard about it from Graham last year and if I recall, it made his post-deadline top ten list for 2009. It's the story of Britain's most dangerous prisoner, Charley Bronson, a man incarcerated for most of his adult life, much of it spent in solitary confinement. Bronson is a wickedly entertaining film, directed with some nice stylistic touches by Danish film maker Nicholas Winding Refn (of Pusher fame, a film worth seeing if you missed it). The star of the film is undoubtedly Tom Hardy, who arguably delivers the most compelling performance of the year as the barking-mad Bronson. He is simply stunning. I'm not sure you can (or should try to) read much into Bronson. For all the operatic indulgences and surreal stage play structure employed to tell the story, Bronson distills down to a relatively straightforward biography about the ultimate misfit, a violent man completely at odds with society and its rules.

That the film works at all is a testament to the power of a brilliant performance and the unique artistic vision that the film maker/screenwriter/actors brought to the table. On a slightly separate note, the excellent score Graham mentioned in his earlier post is the glue that holds Bronson together. It's almost a character in the film - ethereal, funny and poignant, the kind of soundtrack that enhances scenes but doesn't get in the way. I'm hesitant to go all the way and call this an unqualified home run. It's the kind of film that delivers huge in the thrills department and demands a second viewing, but I'm still not 100% sure it warrants the top marks I want to heap upon it. Bronson left me with the same feeling I had after Hedwig and Pete Tong, if that makes any sense. I'm going to let it percolate for a few days and stew on it before I decide. My gut instinct is to call this a clear winner though.

Which is more than I can say for Give 'Em Hell Malone on the other hand. It's a complete misfire from the Frank Miller boudoir-noir school of modern misinterpretation. It's got a couple of modestly decent turns from Thomas Jane and Ving Rhames, but the plot, lackluster over-direction, cartoon bad guys and lousy female lead sink this project fast. There was probably an OK movie buried somewhere in this script, but it needed a much better director/screenwriter to flush it out. It's about a quarter as good as the 5/10 Sin City, if that helps.

Loser.

Neo-noir should in the middle of a renewed heyday right now, given the general state of the things, but the underlying fundamentals of the noir motif seem lost on the current generation of Hollywood writers and filmmakers. As a result, all we get is shite like Give 'Em Hell Malone. They could all take a page from Melville's book (Jean-Pierre that is, not Herman). Melville's '60s crime films took the noir in an entirely different direction than recent filmmakers have opted for, boiling down the traditional tropes of film noir to the barest minimums - fedoras, trench coats and handguns. The dialogue was spare, the violence minimal and the doom...palpable. His greatest works – the loose trilogy of Alain Delon pictures that started with 1967’s Le Samourai, through Le Cercle rouge and his final film, Un flic – are remarkable for their emotional and visual murkiness. Melville famously described his vision for Un flic as being “a colour film in black and white” This sparse vision and pared-down style lent gravity and a gripping cool to his films, something completely missed in the noisy and cluttered direction of modern neo-noirs.

Sooner or later, we'll hopefully find a filmmaker who “gets it” and dials it down rather than up. Film Noir works best in the desperate and quiet world of a protagonist with nowhere to turn. If he isn't screwed by the 15 minute mark, it's just another crime flick.

Kadas Full of Grace

Jaa-love.

The new Thai-actioner Ong Bak 2 has as much in common with the original Ong Bak as The Aviator has with Gangs of New York.... in short, beyond sharing a single cast member, nothing. This supposed “prequel” takes Thai ass-kicker Tony Jaa back 1000 years where we witness his childhood martial arts training unfolding amongst a sort of Sherwood Forest band of outlaws, led by Robinratana Hoodsanitwoogthul. Like a good old-fashioned porno, the "plot" halfheartedly attempts to hang some sort of story on the gonzo action sequences that follow... ultimately pointless, but necessary I guess.

The action comes on hard during the second half and the film ends abruptly after a furious 25 minute one-man-army fight sequence that includes elephants, an unexplained bird-person and dozens of opponents dressed in black with wicker baskets on their heads being dispatched in various bone-crunching ways. I keep coming back to the porno analogy because the plot of Ong Bak 2 is nearly identical to both of the Best-of-Gay-Bukakke films Tom recently lent me.... a little guy surrounded by a whole bunch of bigger guys pointing their weapons at him. While not quite as ferocious as the original, Ong Bak 2 delivers a healthy dose of martial arts thrashings and ends in a way that makes you think you need to flip over the disk to watch the rest of it. You'll have to wait a bit though because that's called Ong Bak 3 and it isn't releasing until later this year. I'm guessing it'll be set 1000 years in the future and, taken together, the trilogy will dovetail into a kind of Thai “Fountain”.

Sporgey.

Seriously, Man....

A nod for best picture at the upcoming Oscars...by the infallible Coen Brothers franchise...entirely set in some unnamed Jewish Mid-West community... during the coolest decade of the 20th Century. Wow...talk about a film designed to make any criticism of it nearly unthinkable. If you dislike it, you're chastised for lacking any understanding of film (the Coen's are brilliant and you just didn't get it) and for likely being a racist (or at the very least, antisemitic). You obviously hate Jews if you don't like stories about them and are more than likely a terrorist.  The vitriol aimed at any critic who voiced the opinion that A Serious Man comes off as a smug, mean-spirited, pointlessly vindictive and terribly unfunny black-comedy was quick and severe. Poor Paul Chambers from CNN (that bastion of thoughtful film critiques) drew this response from someone who felt his negative review of the film was misguided.....

(from tomatoesrotten.moc) alic b. writes...
“...sir, perhaps you should try Bobsponge squarepants...that should be mainstream enough. hank god for Cohen brothers. just the fact that you are starting a recension of a Cohen brothers movie with a "mainstream" in your mind, means you have no idea what you are doing Sir...how did you get this jobe is beyond any comprehension...jeeeeez!!! as love flag said, read a book or something please... [sic]”

...and really, what could you possibly add to that?

Bobsporge Brownshirt

Day 4/5 of SNUFF

A '70s triple bill starting with Rolling Thunder from 1977, an extremely difficult film to track down for some reason with a great performance by William Devane. Devane plays a released Vietnam POW who returns to San Antonio to a hero's welcome after 7 years of brutal captivity - only to find a wife whose fallen in love with someone else and a son who doesn't remember him. The locals give him a Caddy and 2000 silver dollars, one for everyday of his captivity, but soon after, bad dudes show up to steal the cash. They garbarate his hand (see the face one makes when that happens to the right), murder his family and leave him for dead.“Armed” with about 700 guns, a sharpened prosthetic hook, and Tommy Lee Jones, the Major goes a huntin'. As revenge films go, they don't come much revengier than Rolling Thunder. Winner!

Next up was the nearly indescribable (some would say - mostly unwatchable) Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, made by director Sam Fuller for German TV in 1972. The whole thing is in English, which seems odd for a German TV program. It's a little like Fassbinder directing an episode of Kojak entirely in German. Truth be told, Dead Pigeon is monumentally awful, the script borders on hallucinatory and the acting …. dear lord, the acting ….is... just breathtakingly hopeless.

And yet it's strangely riveting. If Bresson made minimalist films, then Fuller's style could only be described as maximulist. To cite an example from the surreal Dead Pigeon, there's an extended scene where the lead is trailing a woman through the streets of Bonn. He can't be more than 3 steps behind her the entire time and it becomes clear that Fuller is just fucking with us. If she stopped quickly, he'd run right into her and it just gets loopier from there. The final scene can be watched here if you want to get a sense of just how bizarre this TV film is. Acting Brilliant!

Lastly, I finished Chandler tonight, a neo-noir from 1971 that's about 1/100th as good as Altman's The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould from a couple of years later. Warren Oates, on the other hand is perfectly cast as a down and out P.I. and it makes you wish he'd been cast in place of Gould in Altman's mini-masterpiece. Now that would have been something. Somebody named Paul Magwood directed Chandler and while it isn't as awful as the IMDb user comments would suggest, Magwood never directed anything else for reasons that become obvious as the film wears on. It often feels like a shitty episode of Mannix, but Oates's performance makes it almost worthy of the time invested. An interesting total failure. (You'll notice Oates is sporting the then-popular garbarator face for the poster)

Deadbeat at Dawn (1988)

Depraved indie bad boy Jim Van Bebber locks down the low-budget, ultra-badass vibe in this entry, in which he also stars and does his own stunts, including leaping off quite a tall bridge. The tag line for the film is "He quit the gangs, they killed his girl", and if you need more explanation than that, stop reading now. Van Bebber nails the look and feel of grimy '80s actioners, but with an air of authenticity (perhaps coming from the suitably decaying Dayton, Ohio cityscapes that frame the film) lacking in many of the more polished offerings of the era.

In his little interview (on the lovingly assembled Dark Sky DVD, part of the "Visions of Hell: The Films of Jim Van Bebber" box, which also includes The Manson Family and several early shorts), Van Bebber relates how he wanted to create a mashup of The Warriors and some of the Chuck Norris films he worshiped. He does that, certainly, but adds his own stamp to the film with psychedelic montages, graphic drug use and the main character's rather explicit spiral into near-oblivion.The final 10 minutes are spectacularly bloody and primal; Van Bebber and cast do a remarkable job creating a palapable mix of menace and fatalistic humour.

Not to everyone's tastes, for sure, but if you can dig either of the aforementioned precedents of this film, you'll find something both familiar and unique in Deadbeat at Dawn. I enjoyed it so much I bought the box set for myself, for what little that's worth.  Check it.

Dark Side of the Men

While hardly an example of “nearly-unseen” cinema, at long last I finally watched Raging Bull yesterday, a film many consider to represent Martin Scorsese's cinematic high-water mark. Hard to disagree with that. It's also a movie that's been analyzed, dissected and written about countless times and I've got nothing to add that hasn't been said about it 1000 times before. Coincidentally, Nick and I watched (rewatched, in my case) Du Rififi chez les hommes, a remarkable and influential 1955 French crime film by blacklisted director Jules Dassin. As I reflected on Raging Bull and Rififi (a personal favourite of mine that in no small way, more than a decade ago now, contributed to the birth of the Film Buff), something about the themes they shared got my thinking about the influences and connections between these two films and the styles they represent.

The now-nearly-forgotten Jules Dassin was a victim of the McCarthy-era communist witch-hunts that occurred in Hollywood around 1950. He was one of those named by Elia Kazan, which effectively ended his career in Hollywood and severely undermined his later efforts to get work in Europe, where he fled after the HUAC trials. Rififi was his first film after leaving the U.S. five years earlier, which he grudgingly directed for a flat fee of $8,000, mostly because he was broke. He hated the book it was based on and significantly revised the script to include the now-famous heist scene. What started as an unwanted project landed Dassin a Best Director prize at Cannes, and although most Hollywood types continued to shun him, the film became a critical and commercial success, putting Dassin on the list of important directors working in Europe at the time. Sidebar....Gene Kelly was one of the few American stars who openly engaged with Dassin in public at Cannes that year, a testament to both Kelly's class act qualities and how the blacklisting stain stayed with people like Dassin.

While not the first true heist film (that honour probably goes to John Huston's 1950 Asphalt Jungle), Rififi is the first caper film to deal in detail with the planning and execution of the “perfect” heist. It is the film that almost all subsequent heist films can be traced back to. Rififi is best remembered today for its signature scene (the nighttime theft of millions in jewels), shot with minimal sound, no music or dialogue and lasting 20+ minutes, but what rarely gets mentioned is just how downbeat, fatalist and just plain mean the balance of the film is. The characters are mostly reprehensible criminals, living by some twisted code of ethics, a misplaced honour-among-thieves edict that brings on the inevitable downfall of each of them. Rififi represents the end of a mini-cycle of Dassin's that started with Brute Force and continued through The Naked City, Thieves Highway and his other masterpiece, Night in the City, the film he was in the middle of editing when Kazan named him to the committee. This cycle includes several points that connect them, not the least of which is their decidedly anti-capitalist bent, which likely contributed to his being blacklisting.

But what does all this have to do with Raging Bull? Dassin was one of the earliest directors to consistently work stories around characters with less-than-redeeming qualities. Scorsese's La Mota can trace a direct lineage to Dassin's underworld prisoners and mobsters – flawed protagonists whose actions were selfish and often destructive. Dassin didn't shy away from the underbelly of the human condition and made films about our weaknesses instead of our strengths. These themes put him at odds with the mom-and-apple-pie version of America that it liked (and still prefers) to hide behind. Even though the noir canon is filled with flawed characters, none were as consistently pitch black as Dassin's rogues gallery of ne'er'-do-wells. The 5 films he made from Brute Force (in 1947) to Rififi (in '55) became trailblazing signposts for an entire generation of film makers that followed, allowing young directors like Scorsese the latitude to expand and rework these themes. Like Rififi was for Dassin, Raging Bull would be the culmination of Scorsese's early exploration of humanity's dark side. Neither would return to the raw, self-destructive, single-character dramas they peaked with in both Rififi and Raging Bull. Dassin ended up in Greece and made mostly forgettable pictures thereafter. Scorsese's work became arguably more complex but he never quite recaptured the brutal realism of his earlier works. Connecting these two filmmakers might be a bit of a stretch but, particularly during these respective periods, they both seemed to be exploring similar themes. Two parts the flip side of the American dream and one part the evil that men do.

Post Script.....

I've fallen behind a little on my reports from SNUFF - what with all the gala openings and crazy parties that invariably accompany it - so I may try to shoehorn in another report later today on yesterday's stellar return to the unknown world of B-movies. On tap was the revenge flick Rolling Thunder (1977) with William Devane, Sam Fuller's delirious and rarely seen Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972) and universally-despised Warren Oates neo-noir vehicle, Chandler (1971).

Cage-Match!

SNUFF goes off-roading today with 3 stupendously different films starting with Edward Yang's 3-hour Taiwanese family drama, Yi-Yi (2000), followed immediately by The Pang Bros' Bangkok Dangerous (2008), and finally a revisit of A Bridge Too Far (1977) starring everyone, except Paul Newman, who stayed home to be on Carson and Steve McQueen, who died in the parachute drop. Nicholas Cage stars in all three films


… a one and a two..... Yi-Yi is dull as dishwater, but I spent most of the time reading the Sunday New York Times while it was on and didn't really pay it much mind. I think there's a good movie in there, perhaps even a great one, but it needed to be edited at least in half. As it stands, it's too long by at least the front and Week In Review sections of the Times. I watched the final hour fairly closely, except while I was in the shower, and enjoyed what I saw of it. Cage (see right) is riveting as Yang-Yang, a little Taiwanese child. The cat wisely slept through the whole thing. Taiwan looks like a cool place.

Back to Thailand this afternoon to view the much-maligned Bangkok Dangerous, a title that seems more like a warning than a movie. Loved it. Nicholas Cage once again owns this movie. It's a completely kooky film made immeasurably better by the jet-black WWE hairdo Cage sports throughout. I particularly liked the opening sequence where the Czech-that-out secret police position their important prisoner right in front of a big window, paint a bullseye on his forehead and then light up the room like the fourth of July. Cage, of course, wastes 'im... blind-sniper-assassin-style! (see left). It's immediately followed by Cage tazering his junkie Czech-mate to death and then dosing him with about a litre of herion to wipe clean any trace of his presence in Prog. Nary a Pang of guilt from the Thai brotherhood in the script department. I've already forgotten what happens after that. Bangkok looks like a cool place too.

Tonight's sold-out screening of A Bridge Too Far (Canfield, the cat and I) was a winner. This might be the last of the cast-of-thousands mega-pics of the '70s, but what a cast it is. Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Nicholas Cage, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell, Liv Ullmann, Denholm Elliott, and Colin Farrell, although not that Colin Farrell. This is a big-ass war film by director Richard Attenborough that has the entire citizenry of Beverly Hills attacking Nazis in Holland and failing miserably... just as you'd expect. Holland looks like a nice place at the start.... a little less so by the end. Interestingly, A Bridge Too Far is 1 minute shorter than Yi-Yi for some reason, even though way more happens. Cage puts a highly unusual spin on his portrayal of Dwight D. Eisenhower, playing him as a gay cowboy, but it works. (see right)

Tomorrow.... Westerns!  scratch that..... Bad Men!