FilmVomit

If ever there was proof that Lynch was not meant to be a sculptor, this is it. The piece is clever, in that art student way. And of course, there is Philadelphia all over the place. Vomited across the screen.

Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)

Just as an aside, did you know David Lynch sells coffee? Apparently it’s delicious. Tastes like existential terror.

Ben Kingsley is terrifying and beautiful. The film sags at points, but he never does.

House of Sand and Fog

I figured out, after much puzzling, what it is about this film that I like. It isn’t particularly good, and it’s essentially morally bankrupt. But it is the first film to take the classic Hitchcock formula and modernize it in a way that is truly effective. Rather than copying Hitchcock, Slade has managed to re-tool him, make his typical bad versus worse scenario into something that does not feel clunky and mis-directed. Even the opening credits, which remind me so much of Saul Bass, and the score are perfectly Hitchcockian. Which, by the way, was almost certainly completely by mistake.
So that’s why I like this awful little film.

Hard Candy

David Lynch has always been… present… in my film consciousness, a sort of hovering phantasm whenever I consider creating anything. Not necessarily his later works, but his early shorts and Eraserhead. The Alphabet is, I think, my favorite of the early pieces. The animation is elegant in its simplicity and the ever-present Lynchian themes are more delicately wrought here than elsewhere. He is a simple man, really, neurotic to the bone about the things that every thinking man is. Children, women, dissemination of seed and of knowledge, power and the loss thereof, waking and sleeping, dying, aging.

The Alphabet

I have, it could be said, a bit of a Herzog fetish. I am infatuated with him, truth be told, and with everything and everyone he has touched. My cat is named Kinski, for godsake. And I even hold a soft spot for Errol Morris, though I believe he reached a plateau quite some time ago, because it was Herzog who prodded him into making films.
Les Blank’s film is Herzogian not only in that it contains Herzog, but because it addresses Herzog as a Herzog character. Werner speaks of throwing himself onto a cactus for the cast of Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen because he said that he would; and of the perils of grown men not cooking their own meals; and of how in this life only cooking can replace filmmaking, or perhaps walking on foot. And he reveals himself to be no different from Steiner or from Aguirre. His assertions can vary wildly from one moment to the next, but they are all true, even as they are contradictory- that is the nature of Herzog. Truth can be found only in the moment. There is neither past nor future, truly.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
(If you should choose to watch this, please be sure to set it to ‘original size’, otherwise the pixilation makes it nearly unwatchable. Smaller is better.)

The stereotypes here are writ broad and large, but there is at least a bit of heart beneath and behind them. The performances of all of the women are quite stunning, and there are many opportunities for the cliché to surface that are not taken. Visually, however, the film is rather uninteresting- the focus is on storytelling rather than on aesthetic- which leaves me quite disinterested after a time. Things that could be taken advantage of, especially the out-of-frame space, are largely neglected. Overall, though, the story is engaging enough and the performances are compelling enough to make up for most of what is lacking in the aesthetic.

Casa de los Babys

I needed to be reminded that I will die, and then I needed to remember that I am well and truly alive. Sublimate the base lizard brain that endlessly feels and reacts.

Stellar

It is easy to forget that this suit is made of meat, and it is easy to mistake this meat as foreign. We rarely are confronted with our status as meat-bags; rarely are we confronted even with the very real fact of our own demise. One must see, one must touch, one must stick the hand into the wounds like Thomas and take nothing on faith. Such beauty even in death, the human body has. Such hideousness and such beauty that can be brought out in tandem- no, that exist always in tandem. 

It is easy to forget for a moment; watching the scalpels arc gracefully and the glistening reds and whites, watching red liquid that must be blood drip slowly or gush in cascading torrents, that these are people. Were alive, once, not long before the camera caught their bouncing photons. And then a hand, a breast, a nose. These fine lines so easily crossed. 

It is strange to think that even the living on film are likely dead, have likely passed through the hands of someone else quite similar to themselves. 

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes
 

I love animation, and even more than animation, I love exceptionally challenging animation. Hand drawn 1:1, large-scale claymation, etc. This, though, may take the cake. Because I love graffiti almost as much as I love animation, and this is both. And it is exceptionally well done. All of the technical flaws are turned into virtues, and even the 4:1 (I think it’s 4:1, it might be more) looks good instead of jumpy. I am awed.
Muto

I didn’t watch all of Zodiac tonight. In fact, I hardly watched half of it. But I’ve seen it before, and that’s enough to click my brain into gear. There is something happening in David Fincher’s brain, in David Fincher’s style, his effortless telling of story, that I enjoy utterly. The temporal breaks are flawless because they are unacknowledged, the editing is seamless because it is choppy, the digital effects are effective because they are not flashy. Fincher does everything with a certain level of grit and grime and he does not waste time showing off. He is already on to the next thing when you realize that this current thing is absolutely and without question a small bit of brilliance. And all of his characters walk around with no light in their eyes. There is never a conclusion, there is never a summing up of the parts, there is always just more, things continue, however they may.

Zodiac