This is the second article that made gasp for one single statement that reads: "Thinking is boring"... Oh!!! What follows is copy/paste of the article.
June 3, 2011
In Defense of the Slow and the Boring
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
WHAT is boring? This question was inspired by a piece in the May 1 edition of The New York Times Magazine by Dan Kois that offered a cheerful conformist’s take on what in certain circles is sometimes termed slow cinema and that he simply finds boring, the equivalent of eating his “cultural vegetables.” Mr. Kois writes that he knows he’s supposed to embrace celebrated films that he variously describes as “slow-moving, meditative” and “stately, austere” and “deliberately paced.” But he can’t, won’t, doesn’t like or understand them. In this he empathizes with his 6-year-old daughter, Lyra, who, at a friend’s urging, tuned into “Phineas and Ferb,” a TV show that she doesn’t fully get but watches “aspirationally, as a sort of challenge to herself.”
Mr. Kois watches aspirationally too. He sees Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff,” the subject of his longest lament, but his eyes roll back in his head. This makes him feel guilty, but not really. He and his daughter “both yearn,” he writes: she wants to be older than she is, while he aches to “experience culture at an ever more elevated level.” To that end he has watched films by Andrei Tarkovsky, including “Solaris,” but this too bored him as did, apparently, the very different Hou Hsaio-hsien. “As I get older,” Mr. Kois concludes, “I find I’m suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables, no matter how good they may be for me.” Happily for him, movie theaters offer a cornucopia of junk food.
For instance: “The Hangover Part II,” which I find boring, raked in $137.4 million over the five-day Memorial Day weekend. It’s the kind of boring that makes money, partly because it’s the boring that many people like, want to like, insist on liking or are just used to, and partly because it’s the sort of aggressively packaged boring you can’t escape, having opened on an estimated 17 percent of American screens. Filled with gags and characters recycled from the first “Hangover,” the sequel is grindingly repetitive and features scene after similar scene of characters staring at one another stupidly, flailing about wildly and asking what happened. This is the boring that Andy Warhol, who liked boring, found, well, boring.
“Of course, what I think is boring,” Warhol wrote in his memoir “Popism,” “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.”
Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like “Empire,” eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one). Long movies — among my favorites is Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” — take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through continuity editing. Faced with duration not distraction, your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.
Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears.
So, is boring bad? Is thinking? In Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” there is a scene in which the title character, a housewife who turns tricks in her fastidiously neat home, makes a meatloaf in real time. It’s a tedious task that as neither a fan of meatloaf or cooking, I find difficult to watch. Which is the point: During the film’s 201 minutes Ms. Akerman puts you in that tomb of a home with Jeanne, makes you hear the wet squish-squish of the meat between her fingers, makes you feel the tedium of a colorless existence that you can’t literally share but become intimate with (you endure, like Jeanne) until the film’s punctuating shock of violence. It makes you think. MANOHLA DARGIS
MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.
Some of this anti-art bias reflects the glorious fact that film has always been a popular art form, a great democratic amusement accessible to everyone and proud of its lack of aristocratic pedigree. But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo. For some reason it needs to be asserted, over and over again, that the primary purpose of movies is to provide entertainment, that the reason everyone goes to the movies is to have fun. Any suggestion to the contrary, and any film that dares, however modestly, to depart from the orthodoxies of escapist ideology, is met with dismissal and ridicule.
Even though, in the bottom-line, real-world scheme of things, the commercial prospects of a movie like “Meek’s Cutoff” are marginal — and even though the distributors of foreign-language films can only dream of such marginality — it is still somehow necessary, every so often, to drag “art movies” into the dock as examples of snobbery, pretense or a suspect form of aesthetic nutritionalism. Vegetables! Yuck! And the supposedly more sophisticated arenas of cultural discourse are hardly immune.
Last year there was a big kerfuffle at Cannes when the jury dared to give the top prize to “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s dreamy and oblique spiritual head-trip through the jungles of his native Thailand. This year a different jury gave the Palme d’Or to “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s dreamy and oblique spiritual head trip through the bungalows of his native Texas. And while much love has been showered on that movie — including by me, once it opened here — it was also met with scattered boos at the press screening and corresponding sourness among some critics. Writing in TruthDig, the venerable Time critic Richard Schickel strikes out against Mr. Malick’s “twaddling pretenses,” seeing them as the latest example of what he calls “The ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ scam,” after Alain Resnais’s quintessential art film of 1959.
For Mr. Schickel the problem with “The Tree of Life” is not just that it isn’t a good movie (“inept” is his succinct appraisal of Mr. Malick’s skill), but also, more seriously, that it gets the medium wrong. Movies, Mr. Schickel writes, “are an essentially worldly medium, playful and romantic, particularly in America, where, on the whole our best directors have stated whatever serious intentions they may harbor as ignorable asides. There are other ways of making movies, naturally, and there’s always a small audience available for these noble strivings — and good for them, I guess.”
Yes, good for them. I will stipulate that Mr. Schickel has forgotten more film history than I will ever know, but in this instance his summary of that history strikes me as strangely narrow. A whole lot of cinema, past and present, falls into that “other ways of making movies” category, and dismissing it outright in the name of fun risks throwing out quite a few masterpieces with the bathwater.
In Mr. Schickel’s argument, “pretentious” functions, like “boring” elsewhere, as an accusation that it is almost impossible to refute, since it is a subjective hunch masquerading as a description. Manohla, you had some reservations about “The Tree of Life,” but your dispatch on it from Cannes emphasized its self-evident and disarming sincerity. Sincerity is the opposite of pretentiousness, and while it is certainly possible to be puzzled or annoyed by Mr. Malick’s philosophical tendencies or unmoved by the images he composes or the story he tells, I don’t think there is any pretending involved. (And while we’re at it, if “The Hangover Part II” is a quintessentially boring movie in its refusal to do anything new or daring beyond a few instances of easy, sophomoric shock-humor, is there a recent movie more deserving of being called pretentious than “Thor”?)
Why is it, though, that “serious” is a bad word in cultural conversations, or at least in discussions of film? Why is thinking about a movie an activity to be avoided, and a movie that seems to require thinking a source of suspicion? It seems unlikely, to say the least, that films like “Uncle Boonmee,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Tree of Life” or Jean-Luc Godard’s recently and belatedly opened “Film Socialisme” will threaten the hegemony of the blockbusters, so why is so much energy expended in defending the prerogatives of entertainment from the supposed threat of seriousness? I certainly don’t think fun should be banished from the screen, or that popular entertainment is essentially antithetical to art. And while I derive great pleasure from some movies that might be described as slow or tedious, I also find food for thought in fast, slick, whimsical entertainments. I would like to think there is room in the cinematic diet for various flavors, including some that may seem, on first encounter, unfamiliar or even unpleasant. A. O. SCOTT
To read article at the New York Times please go here.
So what do you THINK about the two articles??? (hope you don't got bored by the two articles...)
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Today First Thinking Piece
Not often I get interested in reading articles by well-known critics as most look and feel like "cinema classes" ... but there are always exceptions and today I found two articles that I want to share with you all. This is a copy/paste of the first one.
June 17, 2011
Sometimes a Vegetable Is Just a Vegetable
By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS
ON May 1 The New York Times Magazine published an article, “Reaching for Culture That Remains Stubbornly Above My Grasp,” in which Dan Kois wrote about watching certain critically regarded movies, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” that he likened to eating his “cultural vegetables.” In the June 5 Arts & Leisure section the chief film critics of The Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, defended such films, adding to a vigorous, sometimes fractious discussion about so-called boring and slow films that is still continuing, lighting up the blogosphere and beyond, and inspiring hundreds of readers’ comments. They invited Mr. Kois to join them in the still-simmering conversation.
DAN KOIS So often the things we write sort of flicker and die, and it’s been gratifying to watch this discussion spreading across the film-loving parts of the Internet.
I’m not surprised that the response from critics in particular has been mostly hostile; I made jokes, after all, about a lot of critics’ favorite movies, and critics are critics because they take taste personally. In part it defines them.
But these issues — of public and private taste and the ways they intersect — are becoming more germane for civilians as well, as Facebook and Goodreads and Yelp and Netflix urge us every day to share our Likes and four-star ratings with the world. And I think it’s a source of anxiety for many, as it is for me: this sense of wanting to stay engaged with the culture, both high and low, but feeling, rightfully, that we no longer have the energy to take it all in.
Most full-time critics naturally consume, as Tony Scott puts it, a varied cinematic diet. But for noncritics the expense (in cash and, often as crucially, in time) forces a set of ruthless calculations whenever a new film is praised by reviewers or friends. In that context aspirational viewing is risky — whether those unfamiliar flavors are the populist blockbusters you often dislike but feel you oughtn’t miss, or the slow-moving art films you’re worried you’ll appreciate without actually enjoying.
So my question for you two is: Do you ever engage in aspirational viewing? Are there styles of filmmaking or individual directors you simply can’t access, but keep sampling in hopes of finally breaking through? I don’t mean things that are just terrible, like “The Hangover Part II”; I mean movies you genuinely wish you could get excited about and feel guilty (yes, Manohla, really guilty!) that you can’t. What’s your cultural vegetable?
A. O. SCOTT A lot depends on what is being aspired to, and in the name of what. A place at some imaginary cultural grown-ups’ table where people speak in hushed tones about exquisite masterpieces? A domain of art where experiences are more difficult and perhaps more intense than in the easygoing, thrill-a-minute realm of pop culture?
I guess my own aspirations are always to see something interesting, and ideally something that will challenge my expectations and prejudices and show me something new about life, love, art, whatever. I don’t believe that certain kinds of work have a monopoly on offering this kind of experience, and the history of movies as a popular art form proves as much. So I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a snob or an elitist, or as someone who believes that one kind of movie is a priori better than another. Thinking in categories — high and low, trash and art, entertaining and “serious” — is a shortcut and an obstacle, and it leads inevitably to name calling and accusations of bad faith. “You’re a snob!” “Well, you’re a philistine!”
The suspicion that only certain kinds of people like certain kinds of movies slides into contempt for the movies themselves, which flourishes on both sides of the supposed high-low divide, and other divisions as well. Action movies are for guys; romantic comedies are for girls; animation is for kids; subtitled movies are for skinny people dressed in black. And so on.
Our job as critics— our mission as freethinking, curious, pleasure-seeking human beings — should be to smash these categories, which are at bottom self-reinforcing artifacts of the tyranny of marketing. Duke Ellington said there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. William Blake said: “To generalize is to be an idiot. Particularization is the alone distinction of merit.” Figuring out how to respect the particulars is difficult enough without falling into the traps of groupthink and pop sociology.
But what was your question? I don’t feel guilty about not caring for “Last Year at Marienbad“ or persisting in my skepticism that the films of Pedro Costa are as transcendent as some of my colleagues believe. But until I can argue my case, the benefit of the doubt goes to Mr. Costa and the burden of proof rests on me.
MANOHLA DARGIS Having an open mind is my only form of aspirational viewing, which is partly why I also think it’s good to resist categories (like cultural vegetables). The critic who insists that every movie in an art house is art and that every major Hollywood release is trash just reaffirms prejudices (aesthetic, ideological, political) instead of looking at the movie with a Zen-like beginner’s mind. Each of us has preferences, of course, that are shaped by our life histories, and we nurture those likes and sometimes abandon them for different reasons, including education and habit. But it’s a problem when critics try to rationalize their preferences — their so-called taste — into a proscribed idea of cinema. And, Dan, I have to think that it’s this proscriptive urge by critics that partly inspired your original article.
KOIS Well, the at times overheated response to my piece has certainly increased my awareness of critical factionalism and the flair some critics have for being proscriptive bullies. (I’m sure there are people who think of me the same way.) Like most thoughtful readers, though, I usually read writers whose insights give me pleasure, not guilt: writers who are catholic in their tastes and honest in their enthusiasms. The guilt, really, comes from inside, specifically the part of me that’s an uncertain college student, terrified I’m not keeping up.
That’s why it’s hard to take offense when critics, spurred by genuine love for individual films, push back against my piece. Just because I appreciated “Blue” and “Tulpan” more than I enjoyed them doesn’t mean I don’t adore reading smart critics passionately make a case for those films.
Which brings me to the most succinct and potent response I’ve read, posted as a comment on The Times’s Web site by Johnny from El Paso. In just a few sentences he demolished my central metaphor, articulated your concerns about the dangers of categories and penned a pitch-perfect review of a film that I feel certain my philistinism won’t stop curious viewers from seeking out. “ ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ is not ‘cultural vegetables,” Johnny wrote. “It’s a steak. Bring your A-1 and chew on it.”
SCOTT “The one thing I most emphatically do not ask of a critic is that he tell me what I ought to approve or condemn.”
That’s W. H. Auden, from “The Dyer’s Hand,” the first dozen pages of which — a series of epigrammatic musings on “Reading” — may be all the theory any critic needs. Old Wystan did not much care about movies, but about criticism he was never wrong.
To wit: “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.”
And somewhat astonishingly, given our interest in vegetables: “You do not educate a person’s palate by telling him that what he has been in the habit of eating — watery, overboiled cabbage, let us say — is disgusting, but by persuading him to try a dish of vegetables which have been properly cooked. With some people, it is true, you seem to get quicker results by telling them — ‘Only vulgar people like overcooked cabbage; the best people like cabbage as the Chinese cook it’ — but the results are less likely to be lasting.”
DARGIS Dan, I didn’t “enjoy” watching “Shoah,” but I do appreciate it: it’s a long and slow film, and its protracted length is essential to its meaning. Duration is a crucial issue here, and some of the recent discussion about slow (if not boring, at least to some of us) films revisits arguments over what has previously been termed Slow Cinema. In the February 2010 issue of Sight and Sound, the British critic Jonathan Romney characterized Slow Cinema as films that are “poetic, contemplative — cinema that downplays event in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.” He added, “Such films highlight the viewing process itself as a real-time experience in which, ideally, you become acutely aware of every minute, every second spent watching.”
As with other critical coinages, Slow Cinema can easily become misleading shorthand for work that is very different. The truth is that questions of time have preoccupied filmmakers long before Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Meek’s Cutoff.” Filmmakers isolate time (as in the empty hallway shots in films by Yasujiro Ozu, images in which nothing appears to be happening); embody time (the “tirednesses and waitings” of Antonioni, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it); make time stutter (the jump cuts in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless”); slow it down (the long takes of Bela Tarr); and deconstruct it (as the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs does). Without going too deeply down an academic rabbit hole let’s acknowledge that when we talk about ostensibly slow and boring films, the terms of debate extend beyond issues of entertainment.
Deleuze, for instance, distinguishes between pre-World War II cinema, in which time was subordinate to movement (the passage of time obscured through classical techniques like those of continuity editing), and postwar cinema, in which a direct vision of time emerges. In this new cinema — with its discontinuities, sense of interiority and seer-subjects — time appears “for itself,” becomes something movies confront even if their characters (and maybe we too) don’t know what it means. And so characters in “L’Avventura“ wander around and forget that a woman has disappeared, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, stuck in her horror of a life turning tricks out of her dismal middle-class home, makes a meat loaf in real time we share. They are, as Deleuze puts it, “struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought.” Sometimes a slow movie is just a slow movie, but sometimes it’s also a window onto the world.
To read article at the New York Times please go here.
June 17, 2011
Sometimes a Vegetable Is Just a Vegetable
By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS
ON May 1 The New York Times Magazine published an article, “Reaching for Culture That Remains Stubbornly Above My Grasp,” in which Dan Kois wrote about watching certain critically regarded movies, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” that he likened to eating his “cultural vegetables.” In the June 5 Arts & Leisure section the chief film critics of The Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, defended such films, adding to a vigorous, sometimes fractious discussion about so-called boring and slow films that is still continuing, lighting up the blogosphere and beyond, and inspiring hundreds of readers’ comments. They invited Mr. Kois to join them in the still-simmering conversation.
DAN KOIS So often the things we write sort of flicker and die, and it’s been gratifying to watch this discussion spreading across the film-loving parts of the Internet.
I’m not surprised that the response from critics in particular has been mostly hostile; I made jokes, after all, about a lot of critics’ favorite movies, and critics are critics because they take taste personally. In part it defines them.
But these issues — of public and private taste and the ways they intersect — are becoming more germane for civilians as well, as Facebook and Goodreads and Yelp and Netflix urge us every day to share our Likes and four-star ratings with the world. And I think it’s a source of anxiety for many, as it is for me: this sense of wanting to stay engaged with the culture, both high and low, but feeling, rightfully, that we no longer have the energy to take it all in.
Most full-time critics naturally consume, as Tony Scott puts it, a varied cinematic diet. But for noncritics the expense (in cash and, often as crucially, in time) forces a set of ruthless calculations whenever a new film is praised by reviewers or friends. In that context aspirational viewing is risky — whether those unfamiliar flavors are the populist blockbusters you often dislike but feel you oughtn’t miss, or the slow-moving art films you’re worried you’ll appreciate without actually enjoying.
So my question for you two is: Do you ever engage in aspirational viewing? Are there styles of filmmaking or individual directors you simply can’t access, but keep sampling in hopes of finally breaking through? I don’t mean things that are just terrible, like “The Hangover Part II”; I mean movies you genuinely wish you could get excited about and feel guilty (yes, Manohla, really guilty!) that you can’t. What’s your cultural vegetable?
A. O. SCOTT A lot depends on what is being aspired to, and in the name of what. A place at some imaginary cultural grown-ups’ table where people speak in hushed tones about exquisite masterpieces? A domain of art where experiences are more difficult and perhaps more intense than in the easygoing, thrill-a-minute realm of pop culture?
I guess my own aspirations are always to see something interesting, and ideally something that will challenge my expectations and prejudices and show me something new about life, love, art, whatever. I don’t believe that certain kinds of work have a monopoly on offering this kind of experience, and the history of movies as a popular art form proves as much. So I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a snob or an elitist, or as someone who believes that one kind of movie is a priori better than another. Thinking in categories — high and low, trash and art, entertaining and “serious” — is a shortcut and an obstacle, and it leads inevitably to name calling and accusations of bad faith. “You’re a snob!” “Well, you’re a philistine!”
The suspicion that only certain kinds of people like certain kinds of movies slides into contempt for the movies themselves, which flourishes on both sides of the supposed high-low divide, and other divisions as well. Action movies are for guys; romantic comedies are for girls; animation is for kids; subtitled movies are for skinny people dressed in black. And so on.
Our job as critics— our mission as freethinking, curious, pleasure-seeking human beings — should be to smash these categories, which are at bottom self-reinforcing artifacts of the tyranny of marketing. Duke Ellington said there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. William Blake said: “To generalize is to be an idiot. Particularization is the alone distinction of merit.” Figuring out how to respect the particulars is difficult enough without falling into the traps of groupthink and pop sociology.
But what was your question? I don’t feel guilty about not caring for “Last Year at Marienbad“ or persisting in my skepticism that the films of Pedro Costa are as transcendent as some of my colleagues believe. But until I can argue my case, the benefit of the doubt goes to Mr. Costa and the burden of proof rests on me.
MANOHLA DARGIS Having an open mind is my only form of aspirational viewing, which is partly why I also think it’s good to resist categories (like cultural vegetables). The critic who insists that every movie in an art house is art and that every major Hollywood release is trash just reaffirms prejudices (aesthetic, ideological, political) instead of looking at the movie with a Zen-like beginner’s mind. Each of us has preferences, of course, that are shaped by our life histories, and we nurture those likes and sometimes abandon them for different reasons, including education and habit. But it’s a problem when critics try to rationalize their preferences — their so-called taste — into a proscribed idea of cinema. And, Dan, I have to think that it’s this proscriptive urge by critics that partly inspired your original article.
KOIS Well, the at times overheated response to my piece has certainly increased my awareness of critical factionalism and the flair some critics have for being proscriptive bullies. (I’m sure there are people who think of me the same way.) Like most thoughtful readers, though, I usually read writers whose insights give me pleasure, not guilt: writers who are catholic in their tastes and honest in their enthusiasms. The guilt, really, comes from inside, specifically the part of me that’s an uncertain college student, terrified I’m not keeping up.
That’s why it’s hard to take offense when critics, spurred by genuine love for individual films, push back against my piece. Just because I appreciated “Blue” and “Tulpan” more than I enjoyed them doesn’t mean I don’t adore reading smart critics passionately make a case for those films.
Which brings me to the most succinct and potent response I’ve read, posted as a comment on The Times’s Web site by Johnny from El Paso. In just a few sentences he demolished my central metaphor, articulated your concerns about the dangers of categories and penned a pitch-perfect review of a film that I feel certain my philistinism won’t stop curious viewers from seeking out. “ ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ is not ‘cultural vegetables,” Johnny wrote. “It’s a steak. Bring your A-1 and chew on it.”
SCOTT “The one thing I most emphatically do not ask of a critic is that he tell me what I ought to approve or condemn.”
That’s W. H. Auden, from “The Dyer’s Hand,” the first dozen pages of which — a series of epigrammatic musings on “Reading” — may be all the theory any critic needs. Old Wystan did not much care about movies, but about criticism he was never wrong.
To wit: “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.”
And somewhat astonishingly, given our interest in vegetables: “You do not educate a person’s palate by telling him that what he has been in the habit of eating — watery, overboiled cabbage, let us say — is disgusting, but by persuading him to try a dish of vegetables which have been properly cooked. With some people, it is true, you seem to get quicker results by telling them — ‘Only vulgar people like overcooked cabbage; the best people like cabbage as the Chinese cook it’ — but the results are less likely to be lasting.”
DARGIS Dan, I didn’t “enjoy” watching “Shoah,” but I do appreciate it: it’s a long and slow film, and its protracted length is essential to its meaning. Duration is a crucial issue here, and some of the recent discussion about slow (if not boring, at least to some of us) films revisits arguments over what has previously been termed Slow Cinema. In the February 2010 issue of Sight and Sound, the British critic Jonathan Romney characterized Slow Cinema as films that are “poetic, contemplative — cinema that downplays event in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.” He added, “Such films highlight the viewing process itself as a real-time experience in which, ideally, you become acutely aware of every minute, every second spent watching.”
As with other critical coinages, Slow Cinema can easily become misleading shorthand for work that is very different. The truth is that questions of time have preoccupied filmmakers long before Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Meek’s Cutoff.” Filmmakers isolate time (as in the empty hallway shots in films by Yasujiro Ozu, images in which nothing appears to be happening); embody time (the “tirednesses and waitings” of Antonioni, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it); make time stutter (the jump cuts in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless”); slow it down (the long takes of Bela Tarr); and deconstruct it (as the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs does). Without going too deeply down an academic rabbit hole let’s acknowledge that when we talk about ostensibly slow and boring films, the terms of debate extend beyond issues of entertainment.
Deleuze, for instance, distinguishes between pre-World War II cinema, in which time was subordinate to movement (the passage of time obscured through classical techniques like those of continuity editing), and postwar cinema, in which a direct vision of time emerges. In this new cinema — with its discontinuities, sense of interiority and seer-subjects — time appears “for itself,” becomes something movies confront even if their characters (and maybe we too) don’t know what it means. And so characters in “L’Avventura“ wander around and forget that a woman has disappeared, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, stuck in her horror of a life turning tricks out of her dismal middle-class home, makes a meat loaf in real time we share. They are, as Deleuze puts it, “struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought.” Sometimes a slow movie is just a slow movie, but sometimes it’s also a window onto the world.
To read article at the New York Times please go here.
Thursday, 16 June 2011
BMC MOVIE OF THE WEEK: THE CRAWLING HAND
June 12, 2011: Pentecost Sunday (Year A)
Hmmm, let’s see… Alan Hale before he was the Skipper, Peter Breck before he made it to the Big Valley, Alison Hayes years after she made it big (quite literally) in Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, all working off of a script by veteran B-movie writer/director Herbert L. Strock (Blood Of Dracula, I Was A Teenage Frankenstein). Yes siree, Bob, The Crawling Hand is that bad! So terribly, fascinatingly, wonderfully bad!
Which is actually a recommendation of sorts, because the movie could easily have been just plain old fashioned terrible. After all, The Crawling Hand has all the ingredients of a cheap quickie drive-in movie from the late 50s (which should immediately be a warning since it was made in the early 60s). There’s tons of inane dialog (“What does it mean that I’m stacked?”), a baffling plot (the hand can strangle full grown human beings but is apparently powerless against irritated housecats), and absolutely no budget for special (or even ordinary) effects. And I mean NONE. I’m guessing they were unable to afford to build models, because the opening sequence in which the spaceship runs into trouble is actually animated in the same style as South Park or the old Space Angel cartoons. And as for the crawling hand itself, in the few scenes where it’s not obviously a mannequin arm being pulled by a string, you can often see the head and shoulders of the guy who the ‘severed’ arm is attached to.
Fortunately, the movie’s got some charm to offset the stink, mostly due to all the loopy characterizations. Not necessarily the main girl, whose sole qualification for the job consisted of being an ex-Miss Iceland who was willing to disrobe for the international version of the movie, or the main guy, who apparently saw a film still from Rebel Without A Cause, mimicked James Dean’s facial expression from it, and called that acting. No, not them, but the other folks playing bit parts. There’s the “is he mentally challenged or just drunk” sheriff as played by Alan Hale, who seems to have made a decent non-Gilligan career for himself in such roles (see The Giant Spider Invasion for further evidence). And then there’s the crotchety old soda shop owner who serves ice cream floats to his teenage customers while telling them, “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.” Not to mention the landlady who constantly walks around her boardinghouse wielding a pistol… just in case. Or the ambulance drivers who come to collect the landlady’s corpse, only to decide to raid the fridge because, you know, women like THAT always keep a house stocked with beer. Every person in this film is just a tad bit off their rocker, and it rescues the film from what could have been an otherwise tedious and silly waste of time. I mean, come on, the whole concept is silly. A demonic alien force taking control of a severed arm? What could be goofier than that? It’s not like it could happen in real life.
Or could it? (Dom Dom Dommmmm!!!)
Well not literally, of course. But metaphorically, that’s another story. Take for example the fairly new Christian community in Corinth as depicted in in St. Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians. They were only just getting started as a community, and yet they were already beginning to experience a divisive factionalism over a variety of issues such as the picking and choosing of doctrine, misuse of the Eucharist, and arguments of the nature of marriage. To address the situation, St. Paul fired off a letter which, in the part covered by this week’s second reading, reminds the Corinthians that “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.” Basically he was reasserting the rather common sense notion that certain parts of “the body” shouldn’t try to creep off and do their own thing.
You know, it’s been almost 2,000 years since St. Paul wrote that, but he could probably send out the exact same letter to local parishes today without changing too many of the words. Except instead of just calling what the Corinthians were up to ‘sin’, he might possibly adopt our modern way of breaking our indiscretions down into more specific categories and call it individualism. The old Catholic Encyclopedia interprets religious individualism as “the attitude of those persons who refuse to subscribe to definite creeds, or to submit to any external religious authority. Such are those who call themselves freethinkers, and those who profess to believe in Christianity without giving their adhesion to any particular denomination. In a less extreme sense all Protestants are individualists in religion, inasmuch as they regard their individual interpretation of the Bible as the final authority. The Protestant who places the articles of faith adopted by his denomination before his own private interpretation of the teaching of Scripture is not, indeed, a thorough-going individualist, but neither is he a logical Protestant. On the other hand, Catholics accept the voice of the Church as the supreme authority, and therefore reject outright the principle of religious individualism.” Well, Catholics do that in theory anyway. But it’s probably safe to say that today, just like back in the time of the Corinthians, there are plenty of parts of Christ’s body who want to ignore what the head is saying and crawl off to pursue their own agenda.
Part of the problem, as Archbishop Francis E. George notes in his recent book, The Difference God Makes, is that “In the United States, individualism as an ideology is so closely associated with creativity and personal freedom that the Gospel's injunction to surrender oneself to Christ and to others in order to be free has become largely incomprehensible.” And that’s mostly due to a misunderstanding (or intentional reinterpretation) of what freedom truly is. Deacon and Prof. of Philosphy Doug McManaman explains that, “Freedom does not mean creating my own nature. Rather, it involves both knowing how I ought to choose so as to fulfill my nature which I have in common with every other human person, and having the habits (both the virtues and divine grace) that will enable me to make those choices. In other words, freedom is an achievement. In this light, authority can be seen to exist for the sake of my freedom, not as an enemy of it. The authority of a parent, for example, exists for the benefit of the child. This is true because what is beneficial for one person is beneficial for all, for we are all of the same nature (human nature). And so if my father, as a result of his life experience, has a better grasp of the goods of human nature than I do, it is in my best interest to listen to him. For the more I listen to him, the more I learn about myself… This relationship between freedom and authority is especially intensified in the context of the Catholic faith, which is an ecclesial faith, not something private and individual. For the faith that we appropriate is the faith of the Church (Eph 1, 15-23; 3, 1-13). A person is baptized into the Church, that is, into Christ's Mystical Body (1 Cor 12, 13). Now this Mystical Body is not merely an association or an impersonal institution that exists outside of us. It is a living Body through which we receive the life of grace (Jn 15, 1-7). If the Catholic lives in the Person of Christ, he does so as a member of his Mystical Body.” And as a part of the body, he doesn’t go crawling off after his own destructive pursuits. That kind of false freedom may make for an entertainingly crappy drive-in movie, but it ain’t no way to live in real life.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Movie Bits and Bits
Here are some mini-bits about some movies.The Tempest by Julie Taymor. I do believe that Taymor movies are not for everyone much less when is based on a not so well-known Shakespeare play about love, vengeance and forgiveness but I believe that this is a fantastic adaptation to the big screen due to the amazing visuals and special effects plus great performance by Helen Mirren who plays Pospera, a role than in the original play is a man, Prospero. Movie is a bit too talkie for me but amazingly kept my total attention which happens not very often. Somehow believe movies like this make Shakespeare more accessible to general audiences, but unfortunately I know that general audiences won’t be attracted by film, which is true pity. Then those that like Shakespeare surely will not like movie, so I really wonder who the natural target of this great film is. I do recommend film to those that don’t mind very visual theatrical adaptations to the moving pictures. Enjoy!!!
Balada Triste de Trompeta (The Last Circus) by Alex de la Iglesia. Surely not for all audiences as this visually crazy with a crazier story film will not please many, but I found movie to be Brilliant!!! Not only made me recall Fellini but I found love story to be a satire of what happened in Spain during those times. Watch at your own risk, but if you enjoy Felliniesque visuals plus are familiar with Spain’s history then maybe you will like this really crazy movie. Enjoy!!!
Hanna by Joe Wright. Liked the story, liked Saorise Ronan performance as well as Cate Blanchett as a villain; but didn’t like the movie as I believe Wright messed up the storytelling, which is a true shame. Director is excellent for period dramas but when he comes to the present he seems to lose his magical touch. Enjoy.
A Religiosa Portuguesa (The Portuguese Nun) by Eugène Green. Movie has everything I like (very slow pace, nothing much happens, silences, very little dialogue, etc) but I couldn’t stand it, was impossible for me to finish watching. Sigh.
Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement by Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir. A documentary that tells the life of Edie and Thea; actually doc splendidly relates the love that these two women had for each other during 42 years, a story that culminates when finally they are able to get married. You will watch two remarkable ordinary women that lived their life against many odds. Strongly recommend to not miss this nice, very nice documentary. Enjoy!!!
Henry’s Crime by Malcom Venville. Surprisingly entertaining crime-romance-comedy film with very acceptable performances by Vera Farmiga, James Caan and one of my favorite actors Keanu Reeves in a role where he is forced to do his regular straight face acting but also goes to his more human smiling face and emotional acting, which is just great for me. Story is interesting especially because mirrors Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchad play. Great movie for when you feel like having a good entertaining moment. Enjoy!!
La Robe du Soir (The Evening Dress) by Myriam Aziza. Aziza’s debut is a film with striking photography and a not-so-usual story about a student/teacher crush. Juliette, a 12-year-old-girl, has a strong crush on her beautiful/sensual teacher Hélène; everything is fine until she notices that Hélène is paying too much attention to a male student. Story unravels in a sort of Fatal Attraction -French style, of course- that tests the limits of what should and should not be happening between students and teachers. As a matter of fact and according to what I read it was director’s intention to criticize the French education system. I don’t believe film is the usual lesbian interest film as even when the story morale is definitively lesbian, the way story unravels is not lesbian at all. Still film is excellent not only for its top tech specs but also for the unbelievably good performance by Alba Gaïa Kraghede Bellugi that plays Juliette. If you are like me that love excellent French cinema then this film is must be seen for you. Enjoy!!!
Ces amours-là (What War May Bring) by Claude Lelouch. Unfortunately terrible and misleading translation into English as film is nothing about war even when is set during WWII; this is a feminine saga told like perhaps only Lelouch can tell, a female drama during several decades, that revisits life in France, revisits French cinema and is all about love (French style). Not your regular entertainment fare even under French standards but film has a little bit of everything that has been great (and bad) in France. Most notable Anouk Aimée cameo, the passages from films by Gremillon, Fleming, and Carné; but Lelouch homage to Jean Gabin is really fantastic. Suited only for those that really love French cinema. Enjoy!!
The Adjustment Bureau by George Nolfi. Surprisingly good sci-fi entertaining movie especially when really film is all about love, which is surely the reason why so many disliked film as probably were expecting another Bourne-type story as Matt Damon is the star. So if you enjoy watching unusual love stories then give this movie a try and perhaps you will highly enjoy your entertaining moment. Enjoy!
Submarino by Thomas Vinterberg. Movie grabbed me since the very beginning up to the very end. While story is painful to watch film is truly mesmerizing thanks to great performances and the grim reality style. Not often I’m able to hypnotically watch a film about alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, mental illness, and many other not positive life situations, but film takes you by the hand and not fast-not slowly shows you the lives of those inevitably marked by what they had to live in their childhood. You’re the observer, they live, you feel; intense. Highly recommend it to those that enjoy excellent European cinema. Enjoy!!!
That is all.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
BMC MOVIE OF THE WEEK: GOR
June 5, 2011: Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord (Year A)
Recently over at John C. Wright's Journal, the noted sci-fi author could be found wringing his hands over the uncomfortable admission that, yes, as a youth, he was quite entertained by the first six or so of John Norman’s Gor novels. I can’t help but imagine that while typing out that confessional, Mr. Wright’s expression looked something like Mark McKinney’s did in this Kids In The Hall skit wherein a politician learns just exactly who he has awarded first place to in the local jam contest…
Alright, to be fair, the Gor series doesn’t come anywhere near the level of child molestation, but the S&M cesspool the stories eventually descended into is still enough to make most people hesitate before admitting to reading them. Alas, like Mr. Wright, I must admit that I too read the first four or five Gor books at the age of eleven after running across a box set at a flea market. What can I say? I was a raging bag of hormones, the box art featured an incredible combination of testosterone and cheesecake by Boris Vallejo, and I got the whole thing for a couple of bucks. Completely irresistible. And to be honest, the first few novels (from what I can remember) were pretty enjoyable. There was an alternate Earth full of sword wielding men flying atop giant birds and human-sized insectoid Priest Kings who ruled over things from the hollow core of the planet. Sure, it wasn’t Tolkien or anything like that, but I hadn’t read any John Carter or Conan books at the time, so it was a fresh genre for me and I gobbled it up. But even at the age of eleven, by the time I got to the fourth book in the series, I started to notice things were getting a bit weird. I hadn’t even been on a date yet, but I was pretty sure I knew enough about women to suspect that the mentally healthy ones weren’t secretly longing for a rippling he-man to beat the crap out of them until their inner slave girl awakened.
Now, I mention all of that just to point out that there are things about the Gor books which make them both interesting AND infamous. And you should know that because… none of it is to be found in this movie. Holy crud is this thing an abominable combination of dull and bad. There’s not a giant bird or alien insect to be found. Actually I’m not even sure there was a regular sized bird or insect in the movie. They probably couldn’t afford to pay for a wrangler. They certainly didn’t pay for a script. Or a fight choreographer. This movie has the most anemic sword fights I’ve ever seen. We fought harder than this with sticks on the playground in elementary school. Actually, if I had to guess, I would say the majority of the budget was probably spent on the voluminous amount of alcohol necessary to drown Oliver Reed’s shame at appearing in this fiasco.
Still, none of that would probably matter to the books’ devoted fans if the more exploitative aspects of Gor had been left intact. But beyond an overabundance of pasty butt cheeks peaking out from beneath the flimsy Party City quality costumes, Gor the movie is completely devoid of shocks. Tarl Cabot, the flame haired meat eating misogynist of the books, has been changed into a vegetarian weenie, while Talena, the stuffy freewoman turned willing slave, has been converted to a generic 1980s big haired bimbo with a balsa wood sword. No one was more aghast at the changes in the story than the psuedonymous John Norman himself, who wrote shortly after the movie’s release, "I did have a consultancy with the films and sent the producer something like 160 pages of single-spaced comments, suggestions etc. It would seem, however, that very little of this, if anything, went into the movie… Those who see the films, I gather, if they are not acquainted with the books themselves, may find it difficult to understand why the Gorean books have been best sellers for over twenty years." And it’s true. About the only thing they managed to keep from the first novel, beyond a few character names, was the central idea of a man taken to another world where he experiences some incredible things, and then at the end is returned home a changed man because of them.
Oh well. That idea, at least, should hold some interest to us Christians, as it calls to mind this week’s first reading in which the Apostles are watching Jesus’ ascension into Heaven. “While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.” It’s kind of a funny scene in a way. It’s almost like the disciples are getting the angelic version of “move along, folks, there’s nothing more to see here.”
And it’s a fitting passage for the end of the Easter season. “In the liturgical year the various aspects of the one Paschal mystery unfold.” the Catechism explains. “This is also the case with the cycle of feasts surrounding the mystery of the incarnation (Annunciation, Christmas, Epiphany)” And of course there’s Easter, which “is not simply one feast among others, but the "Feast of feasts," the "Solemnity of solemnities.” But after this month, the time for staring up at the sky in wonder is over, at least for awhile. We’ve spent our moments with the miraculous and they have shaped us. But just as it was with the apostles, tempus per annum, Ordinary Time, is approaching, and it’s time for us “new creations in Christ” to venture out into the doldrums of regular living and put our transformations to the test. Most human beings have the tendency to rise to the occasion when there are fireworks going off, but it’s in the dull times where we often get to prove we are the people we claim to be.
So embrace the “dullness” of Ordinary Time. The dullness of Gor, however, you can (and probably should for sanity’s sake) safely pass right by.
(Oh, a word about the trailer for Gor. The only one I could find has a non-English voice over, but you know, it really doesn’t matter one little bit. The badness transcends all language barriers.)
Saturday, 4 June 2011
LIFE’S LIKE A MOVIE: INVISIBLE HANDS
A little while back a package arrived in the mail which contained a small surprise…
Actually, the surprising thing wasn’t so much the contents of the package (you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that appears on my doorstep), but the fact that I hadn’t ordered them myself. They just kind of showed up out of nowhere. And because of that, I couldn’t help but immediately think of this…
Pretty easy to spot the connection, huh? I’ve always loved Invisible Hands. Back when the folks at MTV only spent about 80% of their time being a corrosive influence on the culture of the world rather than making it a full time pursuit like they do these days, you could still run across the occasional worthwhile program such as Liquid Television, an animated series showcasing the works of various artists whose works were a bit off the beaten track. Invisible Hands, a loose adaptation of Richard Sala’s comic book Thirteen O’Clock, was one of my favorites, capturing as it did both the language of noir and the lunacy of giallo. The whole thing’s only about 10 minutes long, so here’s the entire serial if you’re interested…
EPISODE 1, EPISODE 2, EPISODE 3, EPISODE 4, EPISODE 5, EPISODE 6
Now, not to worry, the eyeballs which mysteriously appeared in my mailbox turned out not to be connected to a cult of one handed assassins in any way, but rather were part of an advertising campaign for a computer repair and data retrieval company (which, now that I think about it, is almost just as weird). So, I’m relatively safe as far as that goes, unless there’s some other reason a cult of one handed assassins might take an interest in me that I’m not thinking of (maybe the Free Will Baptists are still ticked off I joined the Catholic Church).
But just like any other time some odd little thing like this happens to me (more times than you might suspect), it did make me think. Just because no masked killers were involved, that didn’t necessarily mean there was no hidden message for me. After all, just how often do you receive a pair of eyes in the mail? Has to mean something, right? Well, within a few minutes of opening up the package, the thought that popped into my head was the number of verses in Psalms which reminds us that “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths but speak not; they have eyes but see not; They have ears but hear not; no breath is in their mouths. Their makers shall be like them, all who trust in them.”
Well, I had definitely been given a pair of eyes. Was there something I wasn’t seeing? The Catechism warns us that “It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection.” So maybe my special delivery was telling me it was time for a quick “examination of conscience made in the light of the Word of God. The passages best suited to this can be found in the Ten Commandments, the moral catechesis of the Gospels and the apostolic Letters, such as the Sermon on the Mount and the apostolic teachings.” That’s a whole lot of reading, so it’s fortunate I was able to find plenty of websites out there with good premade lists of questions for conducting an examination of conscience. (Catholic-Pages.com has a pretty decent one to get started with.) Perhaps I was reading too much into an advertising stunt, but hey, better to be safe than eternally sorry, right?
Now, what to do if a jewel encrusted hand shows up tomorrow…
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
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