FilmVomit

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

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 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

At the end of the world there is a film playing. When that film ends your chest will ache with bittersweet longing for a time when you could turn any ending into a happy one, when you could believe it when the narrator says that they will be okay.

Crin Blanc: Le Cheval Sauvage

I cannot decide if this film is an example of Herzog attempting to appease Hollywood, or Herzog trying to be Hollywood. Bits of classic Herzog abound, but they have been glossed and spit-shined into something Bigger. And cleaner. Whereas Kinski’s Dieter would have crawled from the forest covered in so much filth as to be barely recognizable as human (though, of course, Kinski never was actually human); Bale’s Dieter comes out with artfully placed gashes, his skin still visible through the grime. The film is mystifying in that it seems so very familiar, and yet I cannot seem to grab hold of it. It is slithery and slick in a way that feels so very un-Herzog. I am accustomed to feeling ill after I watch a Herzog film, to being unable to rid myself of it no matter how hard I try. This one won’t stay with me though I want it to.
Bale as Dieter, however, was profoundly distressing. And not simply for the lengths to which he will go, physically, to achieve a role.

Rescue Dawn

I incorrectly stated that the Austrians are insane. It is, in fact, the Polish who are bonkers this time.

Sztuka spadania