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Classic DVD: Zelig (1983)

March 28, 2011 in Film | Permalink

"I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women."

The twentieth century may have been known as the “Century of the Self,” but it was a time when psychotherapy was ascendant, people were questioning their egos and phrases like “Me Decade” were used in the pejorative. There was a sense of introspection and healing, as wrong-minded as the methods may have been at times, as opposed to the sheer exhibitionism that succeeded it. This century may end up being the “Century of You,” but it still seems to be just another way to say “Me.” And minus the introspection.

Woody Allen’s pitch-perfect period-piece mockumentary profiles a unique and now-forgotten Jazz Age character, the protean protagonist Leonard Zelig. A man who fears that being himself will lead to unpopularity, Zelig adapts the personas, professions and attitudes of whomever he encounters. In tall tale tradition, he is able to actually alter his physical appearance. When surrounded by heavyset men, his belly distends. In Paris jazz clubs, his skin darkens so that he can play with musicians of color. In Chicago bars, scars suddenly crawl across his face when he rubs elbows with gangsters. The unusual talent allows Zelig to insert himself into a variety of famous historical moments–and eventually lands him in a mental institution, where he comes under the care of Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow). She hopes to cure the chameleon and make her career all at once. Of course, she encounters difficulties since Zelig insists that he’s also a psychiatrist, wanting to resemble her.

In a twist, Zelig’s ability to subsume his own ego is what helps sustain him at a vital moment. Despte this stroke of good luck, Zelig continues to find it difficult to walk the fine line between utter conformity and unbridled ego. But at least he was trying.•

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Orson Welles Really Endorsing Alcohol

March 24, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Orson Welles believed in the product. (Thanks Documentarian.)

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Classic DVD: Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

March 24, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Science fiction foretells the future with surprising frequency even if it doesn’t always hit the target it was actually aiming for. As predicted in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian 1950s story that François Truffaut adapted, books, with their printed pages of words and colorful covers, are indeed under siege. Their enemies aren’t the flames of totalitarianism, however, but technology, which is disappearing them into a succession of 0s and 1s. The paradox is, of course, that even as what we’ve long considered a book becomes more scarce, their essence is more available to more people on Earth than ever before.

Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) is a fireman, but he doesn’t extinguish blazes. In a future full of fireproof structures, his job is to locate and burn books, which have been deemed illegal, a bane of humanity, with their conflicting, critical and complicated ideas. Those who secretly possess them have their homes raided, their volumes burned to ash and they themselves are arrested. Montag isn’t doctrinaire about his work—it’s just a job and one that he tries to do well so that he can get promoted. But he’s forced to consider what he’s doing after a seemingly chance encounter with a stranger on a train (Julie Christie), who wonders if he ever gets curious about the ABC’s of his job: Austen, Beckett, Cervantes. Montag initially scoffs at the notion, but soon he’s peeking between covers and stashing books beneath furniture. He just can’t leave well enough alone like his wide-eyed wife (also Christie), who merrily doses herself with happy pills and stares placidly at insipid interactive television shows on the wall-screen.

Bradbury wrote the first version of the story in 1951, during the height of HUAC, and he was certainly critiquing the censorship of the day which tacitly attended that witch hunt. But his plot lines about the instant haze of pharmacological products and empowering, moronic amusements are right on target in our time. The idiotic entertainment flash on tiny screens in our pockets now, but so too do the books. How we balance those options will not be a tyrant’s choice but our own.•


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Siskel & Ibex At The Movies

March 18, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

About what The Last Airbender deserves. (Thanks Reddit.)

New DVD: Waste Land

March 17, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Picker and union leader Tiao recreates “The Death of Marat,” with a tub recovered from the landfill.

Although it’s not in the class of Agnes Varda’s great 2000 documentary, The Gleaners & I, Lucy Walker’s look at life in the landfills of Rio de Janeiro has some illuminating points to make about forgotten people who make their way by recycling society’s detritus. Although it resolutely aspires to be a feelgood film, Waste Land is surprisingly thornier and more bothersome than Varda’s modern classic.

Even though successful New York-based artist Vik Muniz grew up in a low-income Brazilian community, he doesn’t expect to find a genteel sort of people when he resigns to spend a couple of years photographing pickers who live and work in Jardim Gramach, the largest landfill in the world, which is located on the outskirts of Rio. Because of gang wars in favelas nearby, the trash heap is known to be a dumping ground for dead bodies as well as the plastic that the pickers turn in for pennies on the pound.

It comes as some surprise to the artist then that the workers are often quite profound. Some of them collect discarded books from the trash heaps in the hopes of starting free libraries in their poor neighborhoods and are able to quote Machiavelli, Marat and Nietzsche. He probably didn’t expect to find so many workers who could speak so eloquently to the environmental benefits of their drudgery. And he likely didn’t think he would meet a picker like Tiao, a determined young man who formed a union of landfill workers even though his own family told him it was folly. As a whole, the pickers claim to be happy with their work, even as they live in rat-filled shacks and eat food they find in the garbage. They are dignified, they are proud, they are resolute.

They are not completely honest, however, even with themselves. When a group of pickers is hired to work with Muniz for two weeks in his temporary studio in Brazil, helping him reproduce their photographs in large-scale sculptures with the aid of trash and recyclables, most of them quickly realize that they never want to go back to Jardim Gramach. After such beauty, how can they return to the refuse? It’s easy to be amazed by these workers, their industry and ingenuity, but no one should make the mistake of idealizing them or a life that is clearly damaging to body and soul. As Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Sometimes those stories are laced with a self-deception necessary for survival.•


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Some Movies Errol Morris Never Got To Make

March 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

"'Weirdo,' about the breeding of a giant chicken." (Image by Daniel Postellon.)

From Mark Singer’s 1989 New Yorker profile of the documentarian:

“Among the nonfiction movies that Errol Morris has at one time or another been eager to make but has temporarily abandoned for lack of investor enthusiasm are Ablaze! (or Fire from Heaven), an examination of the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion; Whatever Happened to Einstein’s Brain? (portions of the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex are thought to be in the possession of a doctor in North Carolina, other parts are floating around here and there); Road, the story of one man’s attempt to build across northern Minnesota an interstate highway that no one else wanted; Insanity Inside Out, based on the book of the same tide, by Kenneth Donaldson, a man who, in his forties, was wrongly committed by his parents to a mental hospital and got stuck there for fifteen years; Weirdo, about the breeding of a giant chicken; The Wizard of Wendover, about Robert K. Golka and his laser-induced fireball experiments in Utah; and a perusal of Yap, a South Pacific island where stone money is the traditional currency.” (Thanks Longform.)

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The Canadian Short That Inspired Star Wars

March 11, 2011 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Made in 1964. C-3PO’s moves on display in the first minute. (Thanks Reddit.)

Classic DVD: Woman In The Dunes (1964)

March 11, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

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A faithful telling of Kobo Abe’s novel about a Tokyo teacher and bug collector who is kidnapped by an entire village while vacationing in the desert, this Sisyphean drama by Hiroshi Teshigahara is the best kind of parable, one marked by nuance, ambivalence and immense strangeness.

An entomologist who is about to be squashed, Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada) sojourns to the desert to try to locate a rare type of tiger beetle, hoping his accomplishment will get his name listed in a field guide. A world-weary soul who is worn by city life, the educator is only too happy to accept a stranger’s offer to lodge him with a local. As several villagers lower him into a sand pit with a rope ladder, Jumpei has no idea that he is descending into an arranged marriage with the woman (Kyôko Kishida) who inhabits the hut.

The woman must spend hours every day digging her house out from under sand drifts or it will collapse and a chain reaction will claim every home in the very interdependent village. She needs help with the chore since her husband recently died, so the neighbors decided to “trap” her a new husband. Soon realizing that the rope ladder will not be making a return appearance but unwilling to accept his fate, Jumpei hatches a succession of plots aimed at escaping from the pit. As each hope dries up, he increasingly unleashes his frustrations on the woman. But as the months progress, he begins to wonder whether the hopelessness of his new life is better than the frustration of his old one.

Of course, Jumpei doesn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. He will be made to sacrifice self for the greater good, to conform to the collective will to help ensure the survival of the community, to become one more fungible grain on the desert floor. He will all but disappear into the swarm. “If it wanted to,” the displaced man says with alarm, “the sand could swallow up cities…even entire countries.” It does all the time.•

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Classic DVD: RoboCop (1987)

March 1, 2011 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Released in 1987 in anticipation of an expected urban crime wave that never arrived in America, Paul Verhoeven’s near-future social satire nonetheless remains a sharp indictment of the practice of outsourcing justice and a reminder that weapons are made to be used.

“Old Detroit,” as it is called, is a necropolis only inhabited by predators and prey. But it is about to be bulldozed and replaced by the corporate urban center known as Delta City, courtesy of the greedy overlords at Omni Consumer Products. In order to clear the area of criminals so that they can start reaping profits, the fine folks at OCP have built a robotic crime fighter that they are about to unleash. But the bot badly malfunctions, gunning down an OCP exec. “I’m very disappointed,” says one of the corporate honchos in a hilariously deadpan line, as the employee lies dead on a conference table. But an ambitious, immoral fellow exec (Miguel Ferrer) has an answer. Create a cyborg that incorporates the best of technology with the human brain. He gets the opportunity to hatch his plot when a young cop named Murphy (Peter Weller) is shot to pieces by brutal thugs. Wires and microchips soon transform him into RoboCop. Of course, there are complications when the Singularity arrives, and the erstwhile Murphy soon becomes difficult to control.

As mentioned, RoboCop was made at a moment when crime was rising in the country and every last expert was predicting a continued spike. That never happened (and some of the theories for the decline are controversial). But the film isn’t just concerned with momentary social problems. It also deftly sends up America’s lingering Cold War mentality, which demands that we police the entire world, even when we have to outsource much of the nasty business, as we’ve done recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Greek chorus of the film is a series of parodies of TV news and commercials that comment on the action; in one of the latter, a game called “Nukem” is advertised as the kind of good family fun in which “you get them before they get you.” That’s the mentality RoboCop employs when he initially goes rogue, rationalizing that “somewhere there is a crime happening.” There always is.•

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Miscellaneous Media: Ken Maynard’s Songs Of The Trails (1935)

February 27, 2011 in Film, Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Ken Maynard and Evalyn Knapp appear "In Old Santa Fe" in 1934.

I got my coarse yet practiced hands on a crumbling copy of a 1935 songbook of 25 ditties used in the Westerns of old-time oater star Ken Maynard. The magazine-style periodical notes on the cover that “each song has melody, ukulele chords, words, piano accompaniment and guitar chords.” The songs have titles like “Christine Le Roy,” “The Dreary Black Hills” and “Curly Joe.” The introduction has a biography of Maynard, written by someone named Nancy Smith. A few excerpts follow.

••••••••••

Ken Maynard was born July 21 in Mission, Texas. The first few years of his life were spent on a ranch near this town.

His father is William H. Maynard, who now lives in Columbus, Indiana. He was a building contractor and his work caused him to continually move from place to place. Ken’s mother owned extensive Texas lands which they had bought with the proceeds of Kentucky farm lands. Ken says when he was a boy, no one would have the Texas land as a gift, but now that they have sold it all, it is becoming fabulously rich in oil production.

••••••••••

When he was eight years of age, he could imitate the tricks done by the average cow puncher. Incidentally, Maynard says that the fancy trick riding is a product of the circus and not of the range. The cow men’s trick in those days consisted chiefly of swinging toward the ground for a hat or some other simple stunt. The boy learned all of this quickly and began to develop his own style of riding.

••••••••••

At the age of twelve Ken tired of the range and ran away with a cheap wagon show that came to their village. Wagon shows were plentiful in those days. Ken remained with the show for three weeks before his father came and took him home. The boy said it felt like three years and he promised to stay home.

••••••••••

In 1914 Ken joined the Kit Carson show. In 1915 he went with the Hagenbeck and Wallace outfit. In 1918 he went with them a second time having appeared with Pawnee Bill in the meanwhile. Then he left show business to enlist in the army and was assigned to Camp Knox in Kentucky.

••••••••••

Maynard’s first role was that of Paul Revere in the Marion Davies’ film Janice Meredith. He won the part by superior riding ability.

••••••••••

Maynard has his own airplane and a government’s pilot license. He recently bought a 42-foot yawl and spends many week-ends cruising. He is a home owner, having purchased a large residence in  Los Angeles.

••••••••••

He is regarded as the outstanding Western star in pictures today. Incidentally, all his pictures are based on historical facts of the west, the actor contending that boys and girls may be educated in history through the proper presentation of events on the screen.

••••••••••

 

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Sacheen Littlefeather Enters The Spotlight

February 27, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather at the 1973 awards show, via Sacheen Littlefeather, as some sort of protest in the name of Native Americans. The Academy Awards meant nothing back then, too, but the show was much more fun when there was stuff like this and Cher rocking otherworldly Bob Mackie get-ups.

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Classic Film: The King Of Comedy (1983)

February 25, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

“But seriously, you should’ve seen my mother. She was wonderful. Blonde, beautiful, intelligent, alcoholic. Once they picked her up for speeding. They clocked her doing 55. All right, but in our garage?”


“The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor,” groaned Leonard Cohen not so long ago, decrying the way the powerful could cajole and pacify the masses when communications was in the hands of the few. But that was before the democratization of the media, before everyone had a channel or two hundred, before Survivors and Idols and Bachelors. Back when the playing field was still uneven and a lack of discernible talent was considered a detriment, there was a simple man named Rupert Pupkin who stormed the gates.

Pupkin (Robert De Niro), an obsessed, delusional fan of New York talk show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), lives in his mother’s basement and ekes out a tiny existence while dreaming big. He’s a peasant who sees himself as a king—the king of comedy, to be precise. Rupert hones stand-up material in his dank apartment during the night, chats with cardboard cut-outs of Liza and the like and works on one-liners. He spends the rest of the time with stalkerish autograph hound Marcia (Sandra Bernhard), who makes him seem relatively balanced by comparison.

An awkward meeting with Jerry leads Rupert to believe that he’ll soon be sharing couch space with the legendary host, but it only brings the aspiring comic rejection and humiliation. Desperate, Rupert schemes with Marcia to kidnap Jerry and keep him until he gets his ransom—the chance to do the monologue on Langford’s show. Will his moment in the spotlight transform Rupert’s life or only confirm his failure? After all, unfettered democracy guarantees neither greatness nor meritocracy, only opportunity.•

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Featured Video: “Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon”

February 24, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A brief look at the wacky world of Kenneth Anger, one of cinema’s all-time unusual characters, who’s made acclaimed shorts and also penned the scandalous Hollywood Babylon. How Anger describes himself:

“Offering a description of himself for the program of a 1966 screening, Kenneth Anger stated his ‘lifework’ as being Magick and his ‘magical weapon’ the cinematograph. A follower of Aleister Crowley‘s teachings, Anger is a high level practitioner of occult magic who regards the projection of his films as ceremonies capable of invoking spiritual forces. Cinema, he claims, is an evil force. Its point is to exert control over people and events and his filmmaking is carried out with precisely that intention.” (Thanks to The Documentarian.)

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Little Murders (1971)

February 21, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Elliott Gould also played the lead role in the 1969 stage version of "Little Murders."

Both romantic and a comedy though neither in the usual sense, Little Murders is a nihilistic love story set in New York during the late ’60s, when the city was notable for blackouts, blue language and brown tap water. Originally a Jules Feiffer play, the film adaptation remains the only feature directed by Alan Arkin, who certainly didn’t get cheated with this dark vision of life during an age of steep decline.

Photographer Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould) doesn’t defend himself when muggers punch him in the head because he knows their flailing arms will eventually tire. He’s given up his commercial photo career so that he can take pictures of excrement left on the filthy sidewalks. And it barely permeates the fog on his shoulders when Patsy (Marcia Rodd), a brassy woman with an eye for renovation, storms boldly into his damaged life. She introduces him to her severely dysfunctional family and gets him to marry her, but Alfred still can’t snap back to consciousness, if he was ever there to begin with. The photographer is a portrait of the seemingly hopeless turmoil he inhabits, a mean era only getting meaner. When Alfred does manage to awaken, it’s certainly not for love.

Little Murders manages to make some truly appalling, depressing things funny, but it’s obviously after more than just laughs. “Every age has its problems,” Patsy says, trying to bring cheer to her listless new husband, “but people manage to be happy.” But what if the things that make you feel happy–or feel at all–just cause more problems?

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“It Is Very Easy To Set Up A Humanitarian Guillotine”

February 17, 2011 in Film, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A really strange artifact from 1975, this 30-minute documentary directed by Theo Kamecke and adapted from the book of the same name attempts to make Libertarianism sexy. The film’s writers (who appear onscreen as themselves) are six young, long-haired, hip proponents of the philosophy whose very presence sends the message that youth culture and free markets are not mutually exclusive. An incredible oversimplification of complex political and economic issues, the film contains the type of jaw-dropping anti-government propaganda that would give Ayn Rand a huge boner. But it’s still an odd and interesting remnant.



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Classic DVD: The Passenger (1975)

February 11, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Maria Schneider died one week ago at age 58. No cause of death was announced.

An existential thriller set in languid deserts and brisk airports, Michelangelo Antonioni’s drama quietly and gradually stalks the truth, right down to its pitch-perfect, remarkably understated conclusion, which is one of the most analyzed scenes in film history. An afterthought when it was released, The Passenger is now rightly recognized as one of the masterworks of the ’70s.

Journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) finds himself deep in the Sahara desert wrapping up a documentary about a revolution whose horrors he can barely begin to fathom. Complicating matters are his own personal demons, which seem equally inscrutable. All Locke knows is that he wants out of his life, that he desires to throw away the baggage of all that he’s become. The reporter gets the opportunity when an acquaintance named Robertson, who is staying at the same dusty, no-star hotel, dies suddenly, presumably from a heart attack. Their ages and faces are similar, so Locke switches places; he’s the one who is announced as deceased and he’s reborn as Robertson.

But a second act can be tricky and not just because it soon becomes clear that Robertson was dealing arms to a band of rebels. While Locke knows he has no way of fulfilling his end of the munitions contract, which could imperil his life, he has another problem: Freedom from his old self makes Locke realize that angst and anxiety weren’t particular to just him. He dutifully follows Robertson’s agenda book and is diverted, if briefly, in Munich where the erstwhile journalist meets an architecture history student (Maria Schneider) who’s willing to impetuously go along with him on his road to nowhere.

Pursued from city to city by an ever-growing cabal of people who want to meet the mysterious Robertson, Locke, who had hoped to become nothingness, instead has only multiplied his being. In one scene, Locke’s automobile breaks down in the middle of the desert and he screams furiously at the universe, “Alriiiight!” signaling his defeat. As if the outcome was ever in doubt.•

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“I Want To Conquer The World For Mel. I Get So Mad At That World Out There I Want To Kill.”

February 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mel Lyman, jug band player with a Christ complex, died of unknown causes in 1978.

I recently came across “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America,” David Felton’s excellent 1971 exposé of Mel Lyman’s Massachusetts-based commune/cult. An erstwhile jug band musician, Lyman became convinced he was the messiah after dropping acid a few too many times with Timothy Leary’s Boston acolytes. His unbridled egomania would have been scary even if he hadn’t admired Charles Manson so much.

I was only familiar with the cult because as a fan of Michelangelo Antonioni’s flawed but fascinating 1970 drama, Zabriskie Point, I read somewhere that the film’s intense young leads, Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette, were members of the Lyman Family. But they had a lot of company at the commune when it came to intensity. A chilling excerpt from Felton’s piece:

“We believe that woman serves God through man,” said Lou, an attractive former nun now in her first stage of pregnancy. ‘I was sort of into women’s lib before I came up here, you know, “cause so many men are such piss-ants, such faggots. But when I came up here and started serving them breakfast, I really began looking up to them.”

She shoved a spoonful of strained vegetables into the squirming infant on her lap.

“The men here on the Hill are real men; the men out there are faggots, with their long hair and everything. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t let their women get away with the things they do.”

Lou learned about the true role of women from something Mel wrote in the Avatar. “If a woman is really a woman, and not just an old girl,” wrote Mel, “then everything she does is for her man and her only satisfaction is in making her man a greater man. She is his quiet conscience, she is his home, she is his inspiration and she is his living proof that his life, his labors, are worthwhile.

“A woman who seeks to satisfy herself is the loneliest being in God’s creation. A woman who seeks to surpass her man is only leaving herself behind. A man can only look ahead, he must have somewhere to look from. A woman can only look at her man…I have stated the Law purely and simply. Don’t break it.” 

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Not that anyone does. Most of the Hill women, if they’re not holding down outside “female” jobs as waitresses or secretaries, spend their time cooking, sewing, cleaning house, tending the children and serving the men. They seem to do so with great relish, developing an almost worshipful attitude toward the men.

“I mean, couldn’t you feel it in those men at lunch?” asked Lou, “how strong they were? How simple. Life here is so simple. Of course, the more simple life is, the harder it is. Let me tell you, there’s a lot of hate and frustration up here. And pain.

“When I first came up here I was a bitch.’ Lou sneered at herself.

“A bitch, hah, that’s putting it mildly. I was a viper. I hated Mel Lyman, I hated everyone here. I resisted like hell. And the thing that shocked me was how much they still cared about me. I mean, with me my hatred was personal, ’cause I hated on such a low level. But they taught me how to hate on a higher level.”

Why did she first hate Mel? I asked.

“Because he was stronger than me. I guess I wanted to be God too. But finally I had to break down; he was so much stronger than me, I finally had to accept it.”

“Do you believe he’s God?”

“Yeah, in the sense that Jesus Christ came down on earth. But he’s dead, so Mel’s the son of God now.” As she said these last words, Lou raised her eyes in adoration toward a photograph of Mel on the opposite wall, the one on the cover of the Christ issue.

“When I first met Mel,” she continued, “it was really weird ’cause he was the most down-to-earth, easygoing guy I’d ever met. Until he looked at you, and then, oh God, his force just filled the room.

“Now I love him intensely, I’m his forever. I want to conquer the world for Mel. I get so mad at that world out there I want to kill, I want to shove Mel in their hearts. He’s the only one who knows how to deal with feeling, the feelings you have at the time, whether they’re love, or hate, or fear.”•

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New DVD: Dogtooth

February 4, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Incredibly upsetting and wholly mesmerizing, Giorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 absurdist drama, Dogtooth, is a unique vision about a trio of children approaching adulthood who’ve been cut off from the outside world since birth by their disturbed parents. It’s a perverse parable and one that never fails to convince.

Trained their whole lives to believe that dangers lurking in the world will kill them if they step outside the gate of the family compound, three siblings (Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni and Hristos Passalis) have stayed put and been miseducated by their insane parents. They’ve been taught that a salt shaker is called a “telephone,” so that’s what they call it. The only films they’ve ever seen are home movies and they’re allowed no interaction with anyone but their parents and each other. Only Father (Christos Stergioglou) leaves the grounds, and he drives straight to his job as a middle manager in a factory and returns home as soon as he can. While dad is the leader of the ruse, Mother (Michele Valley) goes along wholeheartedly, convincing her dull-faced, damaged children that she can give birth to dogs.

But when Father brings home the female security guard from his plant to relieve the burgeoning sexual urges of his son, the dynamic begins to change and the balance of power becomes unmoored. As hormones rage and natural curiosity blooms, the children grow increasingly violent under their suppression. Soon they’re slashing one another with kitchen knives, clubbing each other with bats, taking hedge clippers to stray cats and performing all manner of unnatural acts.

You could accuse Lanthimos of trafficking in oddness for the sake of oddness, with no greater desire than to shock or titillate, but that wouldn’t be giving this amazing film the credit it deserves. As the movie reminds, we live to some extent by the tenets that we receive whether they be elements of nationalism, religious fundamentalism, political ideology or the ones we learn in our homes behind closed doors. Even if those lessons are irrational, they’re real to us and effect they way we behave with others who’ve been informed by different standards. And the violence and perversity in this fictional crazy home is nothing compared to the horrors that go on in our allegedly sane world.•

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Rivers And Tides–Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (2003)

January 31, 2011 in Film | Permalink

"I find some of my new works disturbing, just as I find nature as a whole disturbing."

Not even Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, a great 1956 close-up of the Cubist at work, can touch Thomas Riedelsheimer’s Rivers and Tides for revealing the artistic process. Spectacularly photographed, the film shows British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy twisting and bending elements of nature into stunning site-specific creations that are so singular that it would appear no one else on the planet would have thought of them if Goldsworthy hadn’t urged them into existence.

Goldsworthy uses the earth as a medium, working with twigs, icicles, stones, moss and flowers to create gorgeous sculptures, most of which are swept away by wind or water soon after he photographs them. The film follows him as he decamps from his Scottish home to work on a commission in Nova Scotia. Soft-spoken and extremely self-aware, Goldsworthy eagerly battles the elements–trying to find harmony with them, not conquer them–which can be a challenging task. He repeatedly attempts to build a cairn on the beach as the tide approaches, but his frustration mounts as the structure collapses four times. But Goldsworthy ultimately grows philosophical about his lack of success on this particular day, understanding that the threat of failure nourishes his art. “Total control can be the death of work,” he asserts.

On some level, Goldsworthy realizes that total control–of nature or himself–in an impossibility. He acknowledges going through withdrawal symptoms if his bare hands aren’t consistently molding the earth. He seems puzzled, almost spooked by his obsessive need to fathom the environment’s possibilities and mysteries, understanding that nature itself may be more knowable than human nature.

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Classic DVD: F For Fake (1974)

January 28, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Orson Welles’ 1974 cine-essay about the art of the hoax is sensational in both senses of the word, zestfully beginning as an examination of one fraud and stumbling ass-backwards into an even bigger scam. As if the engaging, globe-trotting Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory wasn’t a fascinating-enough figure for this uncommon documentary, his biographer, Clifford Irving, who was interviewed extensively by Welles for the film, proved to be a better one.

Failed fiction writer Irving seemed to hit his stride in 1969 when he published Fake!, a true-crime account about de Hory, a perpetually struggling artist who decided to exploit his incredible facility for mimicking the painting styles of masters. He’d whip up a Matisse or Picasso and feign being a former Hungarian aristocrat who was selling family treasures because he was cash poor. Plenty of art dealers knew it was a ruse, but since de Hory’s work was so convincing, they tacitly went along with the con to get rich. De Hory’s forgeries purportedly hang in museums all over the world, and his remarkable tale made the book a best-seller and gave Welles his initial subject.

But then a better subject emerged.

While the film was being made, Irving’s own more spectacular fraud began to be exposed. His new book, an “authorized” biography about reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, whom he had never met or spoken to, was proven to be a phony. The fallout gave Welles an even richer palette to work with, and his story gleefully bounces from faker to faker, examining how they did what they did and how they came undone. The resulting work is a playful, freewheeling meditation, a Godardian Welles film, that examines a pair of hoaxers from every angle with eagerness and a respect that’s far more than grudging.

The third hoaxer in the film is, of course, Welles himself, a self-professed “charlatan,” whose 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast about Martians invading Earth caused widespread panic in a country that was still very naive about media manipulation. Welles admired scammers because he knew that legitimate artists con their audiences into believing an illusion and that hoaxers are just their purer brethren and their creations valuable. As de Hory says of his uncanny canvases, “If you hang them in a museum long enough, they become real.”

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Welles made a nine-minute trailer that used material not in the final film. Click on the “Watch on YouTube” link to view the short.

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(Relatively) New DVD: The Art Of The Steal

January 24, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Dr. Albert C. Barnes was a working-class boy who made his money by inventing an antiseptic drug that is placed on the eyes of newborn babies.

Lacking all interest in false equivalency, Don Argott’s absorbing documentary takes sides in the battle for the legacy of an astounding art collection, points fingers, names names and seemingly gets it all right. The trove in question is $25 billion dollars of Post-Impressionistic art known as the Barnes Collection, which fell into the greedy hands of a dizzying array of politicians, power brokers and self-promoters after the deaths of collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes and the curator who succeeded him.

Barnes made his fortune in pharmaceuticals and decided to invest a good portion of the proceeds in art, after spending a couple of years educating himself on the topic. He had amazing taste, not only choosing Renoirs and Picassos but the best of them. Barnes built his treasures a gorgeous home in a suburban Philadelphia township and meticulously arranged the works so that they commented on each other. He decided to make the foundation largely an educational institution that was only open to the public a couple days a week. Matisse called the building “the only sane place to see art in America.”

Portrait of Barnes by Giorgio de Chirico.

From his perch in Lower Merion Township, Barnes carried on a war of words with the Philadelphia art, media and business elite, who had panned his collection after an early showing. He relished referring to the City of Brotherly love as an “‘intellectual slum.” He especially enjoyed jousting with Walter Annenberg, the right-wing publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer who long sought to wrest the collection from his nemesis. When he died in a car accident in 1951, Barnes left an iron-clad will stating he never wanted his collection sold, broken up, moved, taken on tour or, god forbid, relocated to Philadelphia. His successor in running the foundation followed his wishes even as she allowed the building to pass into gentle disrepair. But eventually the foundation’s finances needed work, and the collection became a pawn for people who had their own agendas, especially those who desired to break Barnes’ will and move the art to Philadelphia rather than merely raising some money to preserve the collection as it was, which probably wouldn’t have been difficult to do.

What followed was similar to the legal shenanigans that went on after Mark Rothko’s death, except much more was at stake in this case, so everyone got lawyered up and brazenly attempted to get a piece of the legacy. Here’s a thorny thing: Because of all of this underhanded, illicit behavior, more people will get to see this incredible collection in its new location, even if it is going to be shown in a blockbuster fashion rather than the intimate way Barnes intended. But no amount of eyeballs getting to see this Matisse or that Van Gogh can make up for what went on. Figuratively if not necessarily literally, it was a crime.

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Classic DVD: Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control (1997)

January 18, 2011 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Made in the wake of the chaos theory entering into public consciousnes, Errol Morris’ unorthodox 1997 documentary focuses on a quartet of men in disparate professions–a wild-animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a mole-rat specialist and a roboticist–trying in their own way to do what the chaos theorists were also attempting to accomplish–find the underlying sense of unity in ostensible disorder.

Gardener George Mendonςa uses his hedge clippers to transform bushes into leafy elephants, giraffes and bears. These painstaking creations take years to grow and can be undone by one severe rainstorm or snowfall. “You’re fighting the elements,” he says, “trying to get them to do what you want them to do. It’s a constant battle.” Also battling is zoologist Raymond A. Mendez, who puzzles over how to create a secure captivity for African mole-rats, whose teeth can chew through concrete. MIT robot scientist Rodney Brooks has to somehow make machines obey his wishes, realizing that every success he enjoys may be helping silicon-based life eventually supplant carbon-based humans.

While these three men eagerly face their challenges and are largely willing to embrace the future, lion trainer Dave Hoover isn’t quite so cheerful about the the old guard being lost in the shuffle of new ideas: The chaos he faces isn’t only that unpredictable, maned creature in the cage with him, but also a more sophisticated world that isn’t quite so awed by a traveling circus. He pines for his mentor, Clyde Beatty, the legendary animal trainer, and the simpler days when the big top was greeted with a sense of wonder because people weren’t as connected to information and one another. Hoover knows that the accepted order has been undone, disproved and abandoned, to never return. New order, if it exists, must be discovered, and it may never be as grand.•

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Classic DVD: The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)

January 12, 2011 in Film | Permalink

A film rich enough to be read about a dozen different ways, Nicolas Roeg’s trippy 1976 genre picture uses an extraterrestrial tale to examine the immigrant experience, the uncomfortable marriage of art and commerce and the nature of cultural imperialism. But in a broad sense, it’s a story, much like Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” about the overwhelming isolation experienced by those who dream the biggest dreams and then have the fortune (and misfortune) to have their ambitions realized.

Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie), equal parts Howard Hughes and Nikola Tesla, is an alien from outer space who’s left his water-starved planet to secure some much-needed H2O from Earth. In America, Newton, disguised as a human, plays the role of a reclusive, obsessive British inventor, and uses money accrued from his remarkable tech inventions to try to build a spaceship that can return him with water to whence he came. In the meanwhile, he immerses himself in the free-for-all that is American culture and becomes the leading innovator on the planet. But more money means more problems, and soon Newton is whisked from his remote New Mexico desert home by some evil capitalists who want to know who and what he is.

Newton is transformed into an otherworldly guinea pig by his captors, poked and prodded by corporate medicos, who decide to X-ray the strange man’s eyes, not realizing that they will permanently solder his fake human eyes over his real ones. Once the deed is done, the inventor screams in horror: “They’re stuck. I’ll never get them off!” Newton knows that he’ll never be able to see things the same way anymore. For the immigrant, artist and industrialist, things have gone too far and he can never go home again.•

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Classic DVD: Umberto D. (1952)

January 10, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Carlo Battisti was a linguistics professor. His turn in "Umberto D." was his only role.

Vittorio de Sica’s spare yet devastating 1952 drama about a post-war Italian pensioner who careers from stubborn to suicidal is a companion piece stylistically and thematically to his most famous neorealist classic, The Bicycle Thief, and its equal (or better) creatively, despite being a colossal bomb commercially at the time of its release.

Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti, a non-professional actor) is a retired Italian government employee who spent 30 years in the Ministry of Public Works but can’t get by on his puny pension. The film opens as Umberto and his fellow elders stage an illegal protest about their treatment, but the police arrive and the seniors scurry. Owing his vituperative landlady back rent, Umberto sells his gold pocket watch for a pittance to raise some lire, but it increasingly appears like he’s a man out of time. Too dignified to beg and seemingly forgotten by old friends, Umberto and his beloved pet dog, Flike, are headed for eviction. The crestfallen gentleman determines to find his pooch a good place to stay before he voluntarily enters his final resting place.

Umberto is a self-described “broken-down old man,” but it isn’t only his coporeal crumbling or finacial fix that has him desperate. It’s also the fraying of the moral code he sees around him in a nation no longer chastened by war. The apartment’s teenage housemaid is pregnant but not sure which boy is the father. The landlady rents rooms by the hour to amorous couples. It’s no country for old men. At first Umberto is indignant about surviving such indignities. Early in the film, he says of his landlady, “She’s hoping I’ll die, but I’m not going to.” Pretty soon, however, he’s not so sure.

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Classic DVD: The Wicker Man (1973)

January 7, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Misunderstood even by its own studio at the time of its release, director Robin Hardy’s debut film, a tale about a prim Scottish police sergeant investigating a missing-child case on a private island, uses a fiendish, economical screenplay by Anthony Shaffer to mock everything in its path, even itself.

Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) is stonewalled by the locals from the second a police helicopter deposits him on remote Summerisle, a Scottish burg known for its capacity to grow produce. It initially seems like this will be a straightforward case for the experienced lawman, but it’s actually something altogether kinkier, thanks to the prurient islanders.

Howie, a devout Christian, is appalled by the pagan sexual rituals performed openly and wantonly by the isle’s batshit inhabitants, who like to pray, dance and sing naked. Even the chaste Howie has to look twice when the tavern owner’s bawdy daughter Willow (Britt Ekland) displays her charms. And Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), the village’s leader, may be the biggest wackjob of them all. Trying  hard to focus on his work as the town’s licentious Mayday festival approaches, Howie interrogates one lewd, lying local after another as he zeroes in on the missing girl, who may have been murdered in some sort of sick ritual sacrifice.

What’s amazing about Wicker Man is that despite lazily being labeled a horror film, it’s really a breezy and funny whodunit until its famous conclusion, almost working as a comedy of manners, as joyous as it is sinister. It’s like an elaborate practical joke, albeit one being played by bloodthirsty pagans. The amusement emanates not only from Howie’s stunned reactions to the gleeful heathenism but from the good Christian looking down on the islanders, conveniently forgetting that his own religion is based on a brutal sacrifice. “You’ll simply never understand the nature of sacrifice,” Howie is told at one point, but what he can’t understand he may have no choice but to accept.•

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