Moot Point

Again, not that many, but I have spent most of the week writing and grading papers about movies, so I have been burnt out and focused on American Idol, Gilmore Girls, Heroes (which, I officially love), and Sports Night as glorious paper-grading background, and which is even better than I remembered it being.

1. Secretary: This is kind of a cheat, since I had seen it before and I didn’t actually catch the beginning on TV, but I had totally forgotten how totally good this movie was. I remembered liking it, but I sort of assumed it was one of those movies I liked but couldn’t necessarily defend on cinematic grounds. However? I totally would. That shot at the end where she looks straight into the camera? It is so powerful. (Also, it is way funnier than I remembered).
2. Gun Crazy: This is one of those movies that I rented, and then it got weirdly overdue, but I wanted to see it and didn’t want to pay to rent it again. We finally watched it last night, and it was awesome. It’s about this guy who just really likes guns; he is good at shooting, but he doesn’t want to kill anything, it’s something else about guns. Then, he eventually falls in with this sharp-shooting femme fatale, and they rob stuff and it’s all very Bonnie and Clyde, she even has a cute beret. It was just a perfect little movie though. It’s one of those crime movies made independently after the Paramount Decrees opened up B-movie production, and it is super-dynamic, including one long shot where you see the couple drive up, rob someplace, and then drive off, all from the backseat of their car.

Next week will hopefully be more movie-ful. If nothing else, they are showing Inland Empire at the Vancity. Oh, David Lynch! Hurray!

So, some people guessed some movies, but mostly people didn’t guess stuff, either because a) no one reads my blog, b) my movies are all weird and old, or c) I mostly picked keywords I thought were hilarious in juxtaposition as opposed to ones that I thought would be easy to guess.

Or all of the above.

I did make some effort to leave off stuff I doubted people had seen — not because I don’t think you guys are all cultured, but just because no one has seen Celine and Julie Go Boating. I actually steered clear of stuff I thought really no one would get, like the Fassbinder, the Samuel Fuller (though I would encourage anyone who hasn’t seen it to rent Shock Corridor and have your minds blown) and the Rivette.

1. Tennis / Masturbation Reference / Health Food - Annie Hall guessed by Julian
   
2. Flapper / Cake / Motorcycle Falling Off Cliff - Singin’ In The Rain
   
3. Mistaken Identity / Native American / Cannibalism - Dead Man, which I think Alex actually guessed in conversation
   
4. Blues Music / Age Difference / Art Exhibition - Ghost World, which I thought would be easy, but I guess there is no love for blue-haired Thora Birch
   
5. Swimming Pool / High Society / Scandal - The Philadelphia Story guessed by Rach
   
6. Deer / Widow / Country Club - All That Heaven Allows, which Alex I think also guessed
   
7. Private Detective / Drugged Drink / Treasure Hunt - The Maltese Falcon
   
8. Makeover / Cemetery / Animated Sequence - Vertigo, which, I don’t blame you guys, I couldn’t remember what this was supposed to be
   
9. Bandaged Nose / Impersonation / Water Rights - Chinatown guessed by Julian
   
10. Kept Man / Ghost Writer / Chimpanzee - Sunset Blvd.

Most of these are kind of classics; I am sort of into like, good-bad movies lately. Speaking of which, someone made a remake of Sisters only they named one of the characters Dr. Lacan. Come on!

Short this week, I’ve been writing like crazy, and freaking out about everything, then writing some more:

1. Talk To Her: I kind of love this movie; it’s so, like, gorgeous and everyone’s so sensitive and that whole tiny man in an erotic silent movie thing is so, so mindblowingly great. I don’t want to spoil anything, but people, he climbs up in her vagina and gets lost there. What the hell. I’d seen it before — I actually somehow own it — but I had to watch it again for school.
2. Live Flesh: This is maybe my least favourite Almodovar so far. It’s still a good movie, and it’s still wonderfully, horribly, inappropriate (like, this one guy tells this guy that the original guy basically put in a wheelchair “how lucky he is”); but it didn’t, to borrow a phrase from Randy Jackson, have the “yo factor”.

I was going to go see Everything’s Gone Green and also to try to make it to the Cinematheque (who are currently doing a Haneke retrosptective), but again with the writing. I did make it out to a talk given by Peter Greenaway, who impressed me with his erudition and engagement with theoretical issues, but failed to convince me of the failure of every other filmmaker ever to understand the medium. Still, definitely worth doing. Then we ate Greek food. Moussaka and the baked cheese, which they sadly didn’t set on fire at the table, but which was still delicious flame-y cheese.

Half Mast
Originally uploaded by mootpoint.

I spent half my afternoon refreshing news pages.

I’m not usually a fan of ceremony, but it seemed appropriate today.

1. Beau Travail: This was pretty good. Like, I was interested, but I’m still not totally sure what I was watching. Like, I mean, I understood the story, and the obsession with bodies and the weirdness of the homosocial group; but I feel like there was some secret that I wasn’t getting.
2. Dark Habits: This is the IMDB plot summary for this film:

   Yolanda sings in a seedy nightclub. When her boyfriend dies of an overdose, she fears the police and seeks refuge in a convent that saves women from the streets. These off-beat nuns include a heroin using abbess who loves Yolanda, one who writes romance novels under a pseudonym, another raising a tiger in the convent yard, and one who designs fabulous fashions and is in love with the local priest. They plan an evening extravaganza starring Yolanda to celebrate the abbess’s birthday and to convince their wealthy patron not to abandon them.

   How could I not love it? Sacrilicious!
3. Audition: Oh my god. I saw this having already seen Visitor Q and Ichi The Killer, both of which are just crazy fucked-up from the outset, so this was a little more…mellow. And by mellow, I mean agonizingly slow. Then you get all your fucked up all at once — I’ve been taking this horror movie class, and I’m at the point where I actually want movies that make me feel nauseous.
4. Visitor Q: I had seen this before, but I felt like I should rewatch it because of this essay I’m writing; it was a lot easier to take the second time. It’s still a good, weird, kind of gross little film. It’s kind of the apex of the “suburbia is so crazy” genre, of which I am a fan.
5. Straw Dogs: So, uh, this wasn’t a very happy movie. It was also pretty brilliant, even if it takes a pretty grim view of human nature. I’m really glad I read this essay right after I saw it. I didn’t agree 100% with his reading of everything, but this bit of historical context made a world of difference in how I was thinking about it:

   One might do best by calling it a war movie; Straw Dogs is unthinkable without recourse to Vietnam. Made in 1971, little illusion left about the nature of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, the movie invokes the conflict namelessly almost from the start. The campus troubles Amy and the “uncommitted” David have left behind can be nothing other than anti-war protests. War, Peckinpah would have you know, comes not only to avowed combatants, or protesters, but to the uncommitted; to those who meant to opt out. Of course, this is the great trope of Westerns as well, so often stocked with ex-sheriffs, army deserters, and gunslingers who’d meant to go straight before the plot caught up with them. Moving the story to the supposedly sedate and remote British countryside, to the current moment, changes nothing. You think you’re so modern, so civilized and assured, my American friend? You’ll find yourself a war before the sun rises.

   It was Sam Peckinpah’s first movie that wasn’t a Western, only I’m pretty sure it really, secretly, still is a Western.

Also, exactly no one has guessed any movies from my meme-quiz thing below. I just remembered why I don’t do this stuff.

From Rach and Sara.

Go to IMDB.com and look up 10 of your favorite movies.
* Post three official IMDB “Plot Keywords” for these 10 picks.
* Have your friends guess the movie titles.

1. Tennis / Masturbation Reference / Health Food - Annie Hall guessed by Julian
   
2. Flapper / Cake / Motorcycle Falling Off Cliff
   
3. Mistaken Identity / Native American / Cannibalism
   
4. Blues Music / Age Difference / Art Exhibition
   
5. Swimming Pool / High Society / Scandal - The Philadelphia Story guessed by Rach
   
6. Deer / Widow / Country Club
   
7. Private Detective / Drugged Drink / Treasure Hunt
   
8. Makeover / Cemetery / Animated Sequence
   
9. Bandaged Nose / Impersonation / Water Rights - Chinatown guessed by Julian
   
10. Kept Man / Ghost Writer / Chimpanzee

Things I ate on my 24th birthday:

1. Pannekoek (Dutch crepe-like pancake) with apple, onion, and bacon, topped with weird/awesome Dutch syrup
2. Whiskey gelato (!)
3. Espresso chocolate
4. Deep-fried tofu, cod with thai herbs with coconut rice, and pad thai

Aaand Alex bought me shoes. That was nice.

Other than that I’m pretty much in world-hatey mode.

I’m mad that I’m not more motivated. I’m mad that people can seriously be upset about a TV talent show that no one took seriously in the first place when they live at a country that is at war. I am mad when I see ads on the bus for a “pregnancy crisis centre.” I am mad when I read local bloggers dismissing the call for a higher minimum wage because 1) people who do menial work don’t “deserve” more and 2) it’s all teenagers flipping burgers, they don’t really need a living wage.¹ I’m mad that I watched “The Search For The Next Pussycat Doll” the other night.² I’m mad that I have this feeling that there’s nothing I can ever do to change anything.

1 Alex and I had a long conversation about how there could be other ways to make sure that the working poor get a living wage, like how in Europe there are various programs for guaranteed income subsidies, which accounts for how students living at home wouldn’t necessarily need to make $10/hour. There are nuanced and pragmatic ways to talk about a social safety net, but basically saying “people should suffer because that’s capitalism” makes me sad. When I hear people talk this way, I always think about this Pandagon post, which is what it took for it to click for me that poverty is a form of violence.

2 They are all THE SAME GIRL. I mean, one is tall, and one is short, and one has bangs, but these are their only distinguishing features.

They are not as insane in number this week, but one of them is actually two movies!

1. Hard-Boiled: This was for class, actually. I can see why people love John Woo, and Tony Leung and Chow Yun Fat are totally good actors so they actually pull off the whole action movie “dudes going from hating each other to being best friends in about five minutes of actual screen time” thing, and whatever, but I find the whole thing kind of exhausting? Also, I have questions: Does he need to cut back to things that happened 20 minutes ago in case we forgot what what we’re seeing means? What’s with all the babies in peril in Hong Kong movies?
2. Jesus Camp: This was both exactly what I expected and pretty damn impressive. The framing thing with the Air America host was kind of annoying though. It’s like they were like “We need someone to contextualize how crazy these people are,” but really, just show the crazy and then have some title cards that tell us how many tens of millions of people identify as evangelical Christians. At the beginning I was worried that it might be kind of exploitative — “Look! They’re speaking in tongues! Craaaazy.” but they mostly just presented the kids and the experience of church camp as straightforwardly as possible. It struck me at the end that they all had Bibles, but they didn’t actually mention the Bible all that much, it was all about a) feelings, b) abortion, and c) how this generation of young people needs to be Christ’s army or something. I kind of get why there’s an “oh no it’s the Christian right” piece every couple of months in Harper’s now.
3. Grindhouse: This is technically two movies. At first, I was pretty in line with most of the critics who were all “Rodriguez meh, Tarantino yay!” but the more I think about it, the more I think the movies complimented each other. Planet Terror, Rodriguez’s zombie movie, is all go, it’s all sex and gore and awful, awful dialogue, but it’s a lot of fun, and Rose McGowan is way more amazing than she needs to be in her stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold role. One thing I earnestly didn’t like was the fake-scratched stock, which was distracting and constant. I get that their whole thing was a cutesy re-enactment of the long-lost tradition of the Grindhouse, but since we all know that the whole thing was shot on digital, maybe he didn’t need to do it all the time. After the crazy, blood coming out of gross giant blisters and machine-gun-leg-ness of Planet Terror and the awesome madness of the fake trailers (esp. “Machete” at the beginning of the film and Rob Zombie’s crazy Nazi sex movie), Tarantino’s Death Proof was a nice break. The first part is long and meandering, but it has the charming talkiness of Tarantino at his best — and the part where Kurt Russell just lapses into the John Wayne impression? I loved that. The whole movie was less “studied imitation” than Rodriguez’s, but it still was (for me) a hell of a lot of fun. Also, I kind of love that the whole thing foregrounds the cinema-going experience and tries to draw attention to a mostly forgotten segment of American film history. Man, I have been talking about Grindhouse for a long time. Short version: you will either enjoy it a lot and think the movies balance each other and are fun, or be like “Three hours? No way!” which is apparently what a lot of people did.
4. Kicking and Screaming (Noah Baumbach, not Will Ferrell): Loved! I am always a little disappointed in myself when I adore the crap out of movies that were obviously made with someone like me (white, middle-class, impractical liberal arts education) in mind. But I did adore this movie, oh how I did. The dialogue is all that smart-and-cynical how you wished you talked talk, but you know, I think that is a good thing.
5. The Red Mill: I don’t usually watch silent movies for fun, unless they have Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or are some kind of Le Passion De Jeanne D’Arc-calibre classic, but this was on TCM and I became intrigued as Robert Osborn explained to me that not only did this star Marion Davies, but it was also pseudonymously directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Fans of early Hollywood history know that Arbuckle had his career ruined due mostly to Hearst papers’ coverage of the murder/rape case in which he was eventually exonerated. And by Hearst, I mean William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies lover/career booster, and also the basis for Citizen Kane. I had read that Ms. Rosebud wasn’t actually that bad an actress, so you know, wanted to know. It was kind of bad until I realized that it’s basically a Disney cartoon with real people. And then it was pretty good, she was easy to watch.

This is a thing I am trying. Movies I’ve seen this week:

1. Fame: I watched this because I like the TV show and I wanted to see what the actual movie was like. The answer? Way, way, unbelievably better. It’s got that late-70s early-80s soft grey lighting and really still camera set-ups. It is frankly much more convincing that there is at least one student at the School of Performing Arts who is gay — it’s too bad they couldn’t give him a boyfriend and just made him hang out with the heterosexual couple, but, for 1980, having him there. They retained his character for the TV show, but of course they couldn’t talk about his sexuality, because it was TV in the early 80s; now I’m wondering if the audience (familiar with the movie) would have known he was supposed to be gay and read his character that way? Anyway, I liked the movie, the way it left things unfinished; I didn’t like the way overweight black characters were constantly used as visual jokes.
2. This Film Is Not Yet Rated: I cannot say enough good things about this documentary about the MPAA ratings board. In the US, film ratings are controlled not by a government board, but by the MPAA, which is a studio-funded association that was created to protect the studios’ business interests. Getting an NC-17 on a film makes it much, much harder to sell — newspapers won’t run ads, Blockbuster and Wal-Mart won’t sell it, some theatre chains won’t run it, etc. Also, images of (especially) female pleasure and homosexual sex were more heavily regulated than other kinds of sexuality. None of this really comes as a surprise, but it’s presented in an interesting way, and the directors that they talk to give us a good sense of the process and how secretive it all is. There are no published ratings standards, they won’t tell directors what to fix, the identities of the actual people on the board (and the appeals committee) are kept secret, they have members of the clergy present (who may or may not vote) at appeals, et cetera. They hire a private investigator to find out who’s on the ratings board; this is an awesome idea, it’s too bad that a lot of what private investigators do is sit around and wait for stuff to happen, boringly. I wish they’d trimmed some of that and used their interview with the Love and Basketball lady that was in the deleted scenes. One of the most compelling things for me was Trey Parker’s story about the different experiences he had in getting Orgazmo rated vs. Team America: they made Orgazmo independently, it got the NC-17 and they were given no information about what scenes got it the rating and why; they made Team America for a big studio, and they were given literal notes about what scenes needed to be trimmed. That is crazy. Seriously, if you are interested in the movie business at all, I recommend this film; also, watch the extras, to hear Trey Parker tell the story of how the ratings board made them change the subtitle of the South Park movie from “All Hell Breaks Loose,” so they went with “Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.”
3. Crash (the Cronenberg one, not the Haggis): I actually liked it way more than I thought I would. I love how there is just so much sex of every kind that it stops being titillating. I wouldn’t really recommend it in an “If you loved Secretary…” way, but I think it has its rewards.
4. Le Samourai: I love this movie so; I was really worried that a grey, slow movie with no dialogue wouldn’t appeal to intro students, but most of them were really feeling it.
5. Sisters: So Brian De Palma basically just “homages” Hitchcock for the first hour and a half or so, but then the crazy hypnotism/black-and-white movie sequence at the end almost makes up for it.
6. Boyz N The Hood: I liked this more than I thought I would; the more I think about it, the more the portrayal of women bugs me, but Angela Bassett’s speech about “you just did what mothers have been doing forever” almost made up for it.
7. Fitzcarraldo: What a crazy movie. I totally want to write a paper comparing this and Apocalypse Now. Someone probably already has though.
8. A History of Violence: Loved! I sort of missed seeing this even though everyone liked it and it’s Cronenberg and whatver. I kind of wish I had seen it before the academics got to it; I went in knowing the end, so it made the first half of the movie much less tense. I love me some modern twists on old stories, with Viggo Mortensen.
9. 8 Mile: It was for school, I swear. It…is not a very good movie. I don’t know what to tell you. Apparently Eminem is good at stuff. And stuff. Don’t make him mad or he will hit you.

That seems like a lot of movies; I think this was at least eight days though.