Adventureland

Saw Adventureland, a teenage romance which is I guess also a coming of age film. It follows some dude from a rich family that has fallen into some nebulously defined hard times and who now must slum it at a local amusement park for cash. There he meets the requisite wacky oddballs who range from the annoying to the amusing. There's a Russian studies major who describes himself as a pragmatic atheist who is great.

The protagonist falls into cutesy love with the resident cool girl. She's capital-m Messed Up (but also from a rich family) and drinks, sleeps with older men, and is reeling from the recent death of her mother. The older man is clearly a sleazeball who has manipulated this girl into sleeping with him. I can't really remember if the girl and the protagonist are supposed to be post-high-school or post-college age. Everyone lives with their parents but then most of my post-college friends did as well. Everyone drinks and smokes a lot and they don't get in any trouble for it. Then again they act like teenagers often do in films, the way 20-somethings actually act in real life. I like to imagine they're 20-something because this hews closer to my life.

Anyway, this is a very cuddly film. There's light humor throughout to keep things fun. Unfortunately a great deal comes from the protagonist's heinous, nut-punching friend Frigo, but the ringleaders of the amusement park are SNL vets and are great fun to watch. The film is set in the 80s and is just soaked in glorious early 80s nostalgia. The romantic scenes between the idiot protagonist and the cool girl are adorable and sweet, well observed and acted. There's a fair bit of gross gender politics involved with the girl and the protagonist, but nothing worse than the usual romantic comedy and to its credit, the film does call out the even-worse gender bullshit of the other characters. The film is sweet and nerdy, bitter but romantic. I feel like in ten year's time, the world may have caught up with the main characters, wrecking their childhoods and turning them scarred and bitter adults, but for now they are unformed, and young, and full of promise. A cute little film.

The Imposter

Saw The Imposter (thanks, Kelly!) It was a documentary about a Texan family with a missing son and the French 23-year-old man who pretended to be their long-lost child. This isn't giving away the big twist by the way, the fact that the French guy is not actually their child is revealed almost immediately. The mystery of the film is how did this happen, and how was the family fooled?

The film is shot with dramatic reenactments staring, as far as I can tell, the actual french guy himself. I think this displays a shocking lack of introspection. I mean, this is a tremendously cruel thing he's doing to a family, but he's gleefully smiling and mouthing along his own narrated dialogue as though this were all just make-believe. The French guy himself is I think the most interesting, simply because he's completely unknowable. Even after he's caught (which of course he must be. we are watching this documentary after all,) he still remains slippery and changeable.

The family seem like friendly people, even though they do all talk in creaky robot-voices. Teh film explores a bit their motivations for believing this obvious impostor (he spoke with an accent, eye and hair color didn't match, was visibly older) but I think the obvious answer is that self-deception is a powerful thing. There's some further digging spurred by a wiley private investigator and by the impostor into the family's background, but it comes up empty, dramatically symbolized by a giant hole in a back yard that the camera crane-shots away from. An interesting film about a very unusual story.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Needless to say, I now want sushi. This was a nice antidote to yesterday's serial killer docudrama. Whereas that was misery porn, this is food porn with a heavy dose of refinement porn. A little old Japanese man talks of how to prepare the perfect sushi rice, how his fish-dealer is the best in the world, how his rice-dealer is the smartest man in the business, how the fish must be served at room temperature, never cold, how the octopus must be massaged, all while busy violins intricately twinkle on the soundtrack and the camera lingers over tiny little cakes of rice and fish which are always clearly luxuriating and relaxing onto the little black board they were just placed onto. This is pronographic in so many ways.

The film is a PBS-style beautiful documentary, focusing on lightness, beauty, art. It sometimes hit Baraka-esque levels of aesthetic revelling, as we visit the fish market, or when we film Jiro sitting in a subway car. There is almost no drama or strife in the film at all. The only note of anything as boorish as interpersonal conflict might be mined from Jiro's relationship with his sons, one of whom has his own sushi place and the other who is Jiro's apprentice. If you were inclined, you could argue that there are unspoken wounds here, but you'd be reaching. The son and the film have nothing but adoring praise for Jiro. It would probably be a bit tiring if it weren't for the loving caresses of the camera, always focusing on something pleasant and delicious.

The film pokes into many odd corners in its effort to break up 90 minutes of gushing love. We talk a bit about overfishing, about Jiro's family, his philosophy. We hear a lot of gushing praise from a food critic who thankfully explains Jiro's brilliance to us plebs. I wonder if the critic played any role in Jiro's rise to fame? A very pleasant little mouthful of a film.

The Snowtown Murders

Saw The Snowtown Murders, an extremely difficult film about a large sort of teenager living in a poor family. His parents are divorced, he and his brothers play video games and ride bikes, making what fun they can. A squashy male babysitter takes photographs of them. Later on violent, fraternal molestation is revealed. Over these sordid events, a drum on the soundtrack beats solemnly as nervy pianos and guitars stutter out jangling tunes. This at first seems like a more sinister sort of Gummo, wallowing in poverty and misery, but (unlike Gummo) reeling away from it in horror, sickened by this depravity. This is not very cool, mind you, because people do live like this and some of them are struggling but happy. But this is not that kind of film

Into this land of squalor and despair steps a new father-figure, John, with his cherubic smile and goofy, Pavarotti-like beard. He is stern but loving, forcing the boy's brothers to eat their vegetables and showering them with gifts and affection. He even teaches the pedophile babysitter a lesson and then teaches him another lesson and another lesson and another and another. This over-the-top vengeance is our first hint at what is to come. John sees himself as a vigilante. The only difference between him and a policeman, he says, is a badge. And anyway, against pedophiles, what excess is not justifiable? Soon the protagonist is helping out with the tortures and murders which ensue.

This is a very sinister film. It's a sort of Faustian story, with the puckish John being the horrible Mephistophiles and the protagonist gaining a devil's bargain of acceptance at the cost of his comfort and of his ability to live with himself. This is not a film for the faint of heart. You see someone get tortured to death. It's awful. The story is compelling and riveting, aggressive and arresting. It's a psychological horror however. There's never a big bang to relieve the tension, only soft voices issuing commands, or gasping for breath. A really frightening film.

Laura

Saw Laura, a noir about an advertising bigshot who is murdered in her own home. Her friends are rounded up and interrogated, and they spill great gobs of expository backstory. Her friends are an aging and effete columnist, a rich woman looking for a mate, and a southern dandy played by a very young Vincent Price. The film never lays it out explicitly, but I believe their weird daintiness is supposed to strike the viewer as decadent and creepy. In stark contrast to this is the cool, sexy, macho detective who never smiles and who is always several steps ahead. In some noirs, I feel the detective is being toyed with in a frustrating way by the sinister conspirators but in this one he's always got the upper hand.

The film is a ripping mystery, full of surprises but for me the most interesting part was the barely subliminal evil homosexuality afoot. The columnist is first seen sitting in the bath, typing away on a typewriter. Someone asks him if he writes with a certain brand of pen "No," he hisses, "I write with a goose quill dipped in poison." Later, when he talks of Laura, he tells how he guided her toward more becoming clothing and hairstyles. This is a sort of wink, I think. That scene was cut from the film until 1990, if I'm understanding the trivia right. Like Peter Lorre in the Maltese Falcon, this is the sort of queer representation that existed only for those who had eyes to see. Interesting (to me anyway.)

Anyway, the film itself is fairly standard noire. It's not bad in any way. The shots are nicely chiaroscuro-ed, making good use of inky shadows, the characters are realistic but also clearly sinister, the central story is kinky and mysterious. It didn't exactly grab me but perhaps I just wasn't in the mood. In any case I can't of any specific thing that bothered me about it. The gay undertones were fun to spot and the rest of the film was a decent noir.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Saw Exit Through the Gift Shop, a mercurial documentary about Mister Brainwash, a graffiti artist in LA. He's a French dude who started off obsessively filming his own life and somehow became attached to the French graffiti scene and from there to the LA graffiti scene and from there to graffiti artists all over the world. His holy grail of artists whom he wanted to attach himself to though, was Banksy, reclusive famous graffiti artist whose identity is still unknown (to me anyway, I don't really follow the graffiti art world.) However the film itself is opened by Mr Banksy explaining to us that this film is really about the would-be filmmaker, Mister Brainwash. This is confusing.

The film is about a film that fizzled out because the filmmaker was an obsessive, incapable of editing in any meaningful way. The subject of that film was supposed to be Banksy and the other street artists, but somehow God Emperor Banksy got control of the camera and is now running the show, positioning himself as the arbiter of taste and skewering Mr Brainwash as a lazy dilettante, in it only for the money, instead of in spite of the money ("This stuff is like gold," he says of spray paint. "You take a screen print of Lennon and PSS! And it's worth 20, 30 thousand dollars.") The film also captures the spirit of the failed film-within-the-film. That film was supposed to be about the rise and commercialization of graffiti art. In this film, we see the daring late-night heist-like painting, the brushes with the law, and finally Brad Pitt and Jude Law attending a graffiti art exhibit, and an auctioneer selling "a Banksy" for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So this film is about the celebrity Banksy, the lesser-known Mr Brainwash, and about street art in general. Like I say, this film is slippery, fundamentally only showing us a bunch of stuff that happened and letting us draw many arbitrary conclusions from it.

This is one of those documentaries that seem to be challenging you to understand it. It's a complex film, made that way by messiness and juxtaposition, like an eye-catching piece of graffiti. It has to be broad and understandable in many ways, offering an obvious point but also subtly implying layers underneath. An very nice film its one weakness is that, like all puzzle-style films, it is a bit thin. We don't learn any great truths about the human spirit, but we're dazzled for a while by the hall of mirrors and elusiveness of the subject(s). Good stuff.

The Desk Set

Saw The Desk Set (thanks, Anne!) It was a goofy but prescient film about a quartet of women who work the reference desk at a TV studio. All day long they answer convoluted questions about average rainfall and family members of fictional characters. One day an absent-minded professor shows up to replace them all with a diabolical computing engine (which is so advanced, it only takes up one room!) There's also some kind of romance going on between Ms Watson, who is the head of the department, the professor, and some jerk kind of a guy in administration, but this is less interesting to me.

This film was very ahead of its time in terms of what computers could actually do. They talk about a computer that replaced much of payroll, but I imagine payroll to be mostly filing and applying complex tax codes, both easy jobs for a computer, provided the tax code is rigorous enough. These reference desk women however must understand complex relationships between data. Finding out the weight of the Earth (the climactic final question in the film) only requires a lookup in a physics book. Finding out who the most long-lived fictional character is rather more difficult, but we clever humans know that the question-asker is probably after Methuselah. This crossword-style intelligence is tremendously difficult for computers (but of course they're working on it)

But here we are now anyway, with computers replacing more and more jobs every year. This film boasts the cooperation of IBM, so we can't come to some 'fuck the machines'-style conclusion. Instead it's revealed that the machine is only there to save the women the trouble of looking things up themselves. With its aid, they'll be able to answer more questions than ever before! Ah yes, but that means some other cluster of out-of-work reference librarians will have to find a job elsewhere. I feel like we simply have to come to terms with people being useless. Currently useless people are treated as wastes of space and resources. This is bad thinking because no matter what a genius you are at filing, any computer is already better. The same can be said of chess. I like the idea a basic universal income, but I don't really understand economics, I just kill jobs for my profession.

Anyway, this film does not deal with (what I feel to be) the central problem of people who have become useless through no fault of their own and wastes a lot of time on a romance. Ms Watson is played by Katharine Hepburn who is so majestic and commanding, but delivers lines that seem much more suited to a mousy little woman. The absent-minded professor, meanwhile, is trying to break up her relationship with a smarmy suit who takes her for granted. The suit is seriously courting her by the end though, and will have gobs of cash. The lets us make the argument ourselves that Ms Watson and the prof will be happier because they're intellectual equals, but it never really presents this argument. She seems much smarter than him, actually. But then again, crossword-style smarts are much more casually impressive than narrow, academic study, so who knows.

A good film, entertaining in its ideas but a bit side-tracked by a romance which I could not care less about.

J Edgar

Saw J Edgar, a biopic about J Edgar Hoover, creepy autocrat of the FBI from the 20s to the 70s. Rumors of cross-dressing and secret homosexuality have dogged Hoover's legacy and this film treats these rumors as both fact and as keys to the Hoover mystery. He is shown to be a petty man, compiling dossiers on anyone and everyone who criticized him, conflating his interests with the interests of America (as powerful paranoiacs are wont to do.) His is a very interesting character and I think has more interesting things going in his head than in his bedroom. I found the central position of the homosexuality kind of off-putting. It may well be true, what do I know, but must we pretend that that's the start and end of his personality?

Anyway, the film is very restrained, dealing with a man in the midst of writing (well, dictating) a self-aggrandizing memoir, talking early on in the film of his character in the book, of building sympathy for the "heroes" and of ensuring the reader knows who the "villains" are. In this film Hoover takes both roles, nobly building an empire to keep America safe, but ensuring that safety via extrajudicial means, with wiretaps and threats and blackmail. His grand goals are belied by his actual pettiness and smallness however. This is underscored in a scene where he discretely blackmails FDR with his wife's secret homosexual affairs in order to get more funding to find the Lindbergh baby. FDR, with the rising threat of the Nazi to worry about, is completely indifferent to personal embarrassment and to missing babies. Hoover crows about this encounter later, with his boyfriend.

An august film, not one of my favorites. It's a bit too dry for me and yet also too melodramatic when it comes t Hoover's sex life. After a whole film of gray beards and talking heads, it's a bit ridiculous to see shout-y gays rolling around, angrily smooching. The film seems to attempts a sort of Oscar-bait capital-I-Importance, but seems like just so much respectful posturing to me, so much hot air. Eh.

Bad Boy Bubby

Saw Bad Boy Bubby. It opens on Bubby and his mother in a gross little cement apartment, the walls spattered with brown splotches, dusty furniture everywhere, and an iron sink in the corner, next to a rusting stove. Bubby is retarded and his mother is abusive. We are in for a long, disturbing ride here folks. I can dig a disturbing film, but I thought this was a bit obvious and kind of mentally dug in my heels. Sure enough, further grotesqueries ensue until Bubby at last escapes from his mother and roams the wild streets of Australia, idiotically repeating things people say and freaking out women who resemble his mother.

The film redeemed itself a bit for me by the end. I was worried that the ugliness of it was its whole reason d'etre, but there's maybe more to it than that. I began wondering if he as supposed to be a horrible product of his environment (ie these terrible, terrible modern times) or if he was supposed to be some holy idiot, ala Being There. Bubby's mother uses Jesus as a threatening authority figure and there's also a drunken priest who comes around every so often but I feel these are not very serious attacks on organized religion. Far worse is the prison system, who merrily abuse Bubby. I kept waiting for some kindly person to bring him to a mental hospital try to rehabilitate him but of course this isn't that kind of film.

This film is ugly and wierd, intended to shock the elderly and amaze the young. Being somewhere beteen those two, I was amused but not exactly enthused and yeah, it was ugly, but not totally. There are odd bits of heart here and there, just to add to the mix. I was fairly confused by the film. I wasn't shocked or repulsed, just kind of at a loss as to what it all meant or what it was all for. I have a similar reaction to Harmony Korine's films which this one may as well be. Eh.

Ninotchka

Saw Ninotchka, an Ernst Lubitsch film about a woman from the USSR who comes to Paris to sell some jewelry which was liberated from pre-revolution Russian royalty. The woman, who is of course cold and calculatingly utilitarian, runs into one of these disgraced royals, a duke, in a soft-focus part of town. He sets to work seducing her in a kind of pushy 1930s sort of way while she rebuffs him as any woman would rebuff some dude who began following her around town. Eventually though, because it's that kind of film, she falls for his charms. But behold! The duke is in some kind of semi-romantic relationship already with the ex-owner of the Russian jewels, a duchess who is old and twittery and aristocratic.

the film is essentially a romantic comedy, focusing much more on the cute romance and involving a trio of funny-accent-ed Russian guys who are practically the Marx Brothers, but there's a lot of interesting politics going on, just out of sight. The Russian woman lets her hair down but declares that so much fun must be payed for, that she should be lined up against a wall and shot. She is correct, of course, that her fun comes at the labor of many background waiters and barmen, but she is wrong that this is necessarily morally reprehensible. The count meanwhile, is always perfect. He speaks mostly about his own love for the Russian lady. He comes off squeaky because he just pursues what he wants which is also, this being a romance, what the Russian woman wants too. How lucky.

The antagonists are the Russian government, as personified by Bela Lugosi, and the jealous duchess. And these are the true bad guys I think anyway. The Russian government was at the time starving its people (the ongoing famines come up again and again in this film) but of course the excesses of the Russian royalty that the communists replaced were terrible as well. At one point (the film's most serious one,) the Russian woman and the duchess snipe at each other, their fight really over the duke, but their words dealing with very recent history. This fight, between the rich and the poor, the pragmatic and the romantic continues to this day and will probably forever.

An interesting movie which keeps its brains mostly off screen, the better to put its heart on display.

Salesman

Saw Salesman, a Maysles brothers documentary about door-to-door bible salesmen in the late 60s. We follow a team of Boston-based old men who are whithered and pomaded, dressed in short-sleeved white shirts and black ties, they speak bitterly about brush-offs and rejections, about thinking negatively and pushing product. There's a uniquely American feel to the film, with the salesmen badgering families of poor and religious folks into buying lavishly illustrated bibles, cradled in pebbled leather (comes in both red and white, but we find most people go for the white.) It's a complex mixture of social forces. These people are parasites, bilking the poor and lonely and faithful, but surely no one is scrounging harder than they for a buck. One of them remarks that the bible sales business is like a carousel where even the gold paint has been stripped off. The others rebuke him for thinking negatively.

There's an interesting scene where they go to the regional meet-up to receive pep-talks and to watch other people receive awards. The pep-talks, of course, loudly proclaim that there's money out there and that the salesmens' struggles are just because they're not passionate enough or because they're not devout enough. It's unclear whether the devotion is supposed to be to the church or to the bible marketing company.

The film is a documentary in the true sense, with no narrative to push, only events to witness. It's fascinating window into a few lives lived on the fringes.