film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: BRWC

  • Four Self-Interviews About Cinema (2 Of 4)

    Four Self-Interviews About Cinema (2 Of 4)

    NOTES: (1) This series originally appeared in the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka) in September/October of 2011. The paperback and FREE E-BOOK has now been re-issued byPocketful Of Scoundrel (an Imprint of KUBOA). (2) Though not essential to the reading of this series, the three films by Norman Reedus being discussed are available through Big Bald Head Productions

    Concrete:                     I noted (and think it’s as fine a point to jump in on as any) that the identity of the Male in this film is presented through two clearly individuated characters, while the identity of the Female, as nuanced and multifaceted as it is, is only filtered through one.  What do you make of that—or first, do you see what I mean and if so do you agree, and then, if so, what do you make of it?

    Abstract:                      I very much see what you mean and—yes—I agree, though I think it’s symptomatic of you being what you are and your need to so literally play with the component parts of a film that makes you really say that there are two different male characters as opposed to identifying them as two explicit and distinct representations of the singular Male Persona. But I agree.  And in this case, while the film has a fragmented, very nearly pointillist nature to it, I can see why you would say it how you do—because the flow of things, the introduction and reintroduction of Male is done through two individuals, literally, the film might well be telling two stories or using one Male as counterpoint or alternate to the other. Though you have to agree that the fact that both men are presented as grotesques, horrific in mask and make-up, is a kind of conjoining stroke in the film, something I’d even suggest, in direct reference to your stating them as two characters is done to gloss over the immaterial fact that they’re different people—they are, really, The Grotesque Male and then, more directly, The Sexual Male, the willfully, needfully sexual male.

    C:                     Honestly I don’t see the difference between what you say and what I said. But it does bring me to thinking that the only other characters in the film (with the exception of the Female) are either background elements, more images than people, or else are purposefully ambiguous, even asexual, in their nature—it’s a film not about sex, really, but about identity, a presentation of the masculine sexual identity and the feminine sexual identity.

    A:                     But I don’t think we should get too far off that way, get stuck in that diagnosable and nameable a slant—I don’t think the film is stating anything across the board, I think it is isolating certain elements of these sexual identities, yes, and then is making them, with all of their limitations, sentient in a limited way and having them interact.  So, it’s not like Male Sexual Identity is X and Female Sexual Identity is Y, nothing like that, nothing so…political a statement or even psychological, sociological a statement. I think the film is blatantly admitting that these elements do exist, or really the one element it seems centrally concerned with exists, and then plumbing this element, unpacking it, folding it out and around itself, tightly but not comfortably.

    C:                     You say mostly, or even only, one element? I don’t know. Which element of the Male sexuality—the Predatory, certainly, the first male is that, but what do we make of the second male, the more shumbling, even…kindly seeming goblin male?

    A:                     To be honest, I don’t think the Male is spilt like that in this film—I think the male element the film is expressing or exploring is the predatory one, only.  The second male is as much the predator as the first and because it is literally the same female figure being encountered, I think this redoubles the potency of the expression—I’d think there was more of a split, or even that two (or more) aspects of the male were being expressed if there was a distinct, second female, but there isn’t.

    C:                     The First Male (credited as Richard Nixon, so I’ll refer to him as Richard, alright?) is overtly violent. Even before the orgasmic moment the violence is given irrevocable physicality, he is moving in, leading in, luring, striking, always—and from the fact that Richard is perpetually approaching and interacting with the female (only credited as Young Girl) through some secondary object (he has a car he prowls from, he completes his sexual encounter with a knife) it is clear that he wants to inflict, that his desire is outward, to possess something he stalks down and then destroy it and in that way consume it, own it—he wants to be the last to touch something (someone) and so not only defile it but reduce it to nothing, kill it, no one else can have what he had.

    A:                     Sure, he is the Alpha predator—he possesses the world, so to speak, from the outset, and the only outlet, the only release he seeks is, as you say, to obliterate, to make something kind of over-literally un-possessable by anyone else, therefore reinforcing it as his, due to he being the one who altered/vanquished it. Everything in the filmmaking speaks pointedly to this—the dizzying way Richard’s entire sequence is filmed, from the roiling shot of the woman in the car side mirror, the background spinning around her around her, to the incredibly (and I would say perversely lackadaisical) voyeuristic manner in which the camera spins around and around and around the very public, very well lit fornication (almost as though the camera assumes the role of all of the eyes of an idling, indifferent crowd) suggests the ensnaring, the luring, the groping, but as graphic (even pornographic) as the sex depicted with the woman is, there is also a sense of great boredom to it, impotence even—Richard does not seem to be able to attain any sort of release by having the woman by making purchase of her and it is not until he quite literally destroys her, giddily, intoxicatedly thrusting a knife into her, that his character seems to achieve feeling. And the complete inverse in filmmaking is present with the sexual act between the Second Male and the Young Girl—it is far more intimate, but cloistered, overly private, filmed close, intimately, as though the camera (and so the audience eye) is as near to being partner with the act as can be, not merely witness to it.

    C:                     I’d note, this back to Richard’s fornication with the young woman, that even the mask changes—the makeup/mask—in his moment of climax and abandon (revelation, definition?).  The very dulled, leering Richard who propositions the young girl and who drives her and fornicates with her is replaced by a figure bugged eyed, open mouthed (with deep sea fish teeth slobbering) and in a kind of dementia from the attaining of his goal.  So—doing my more concrete thing for a moment—the film at that point, how I saw it,  is done with Richard, there’s a shock cut to what I refer to as the second storyline beginning, and (after a few moments) the Second Male (credited as Conehead) appears and after some failures at starting up communicative flirtations (beyond failures, really, as he seems unable to even distinguish gender, let alone intention or desire, due to everyone around him being seemingly some amalgamation of male and female, everyone part-invitation and part-derision) he comes across the Young Girl, or rather he comes across her discarded carcass and it is this he takes back with him to his dwelling.

    A:                     But I want to stop you there, because now that you’ve said that (especially how you have) I wonder why you so still identify this as the same woman.  Literally I see why—it is the same actress and we just witnessed her mutilated and now we witness that still mutilated body being discovered—but really I would have to say that this re-introduction does have a distinct (and necessarily distinct) identity change built in: she is now Woman-as-Corpse, in a sense she is now an utter, will-less object, whereas on her first introduction she was Woman-as-Commodity, was still viable, and possessing and showcasing some semblance of conscious acceptance, interaction, inclusion in her circumstances—indeed, even as she’s driven to the initial encounter with Richard she only has eyes for herself, applying makeup in car mirrors, watching herself dance in elevator reflections, but with Conehead she is inanimate, he decides every aspect of her appearance, her positioning, her purpose, all without regard or desire for her conscious assent.  Really, she is an object in both encounters, but the change from animate to inanimate nature and that she is encountered first (in what you call Story One) as Animate and then (in your Story Two) as Inanimate—the approach of each male, therefore, to something different—is enough to, I think, according to your terms, call her a different character—or rather, because I don’t want to trip on my own semantics, a wholly different aspect of a single character.

    C:                     I don’t argue with that—nor do I absolutely agree (nor do I exactly see what you mean, quite honestly) but I get where you’re coming from. But what I don’t get from that saming of the woman is how the male is still perceived as predatory.  I mean, as concrete and literal as I am, I do understand that the film is not literally saying that Conehead found a carcass, took it home, cleaned it, and fornicated it back to life, but I do think the film is expressing first—between Richard and the woman—a predatory, violent drive, male-toward-female, and is expressing second—between Conehead and the woman—an almost moral, despairing, nurturing aspect of male sexuality, the desire to make alive again what was (or at least seemed) destroyed.  I know, I know there can be some undertones of chauvinism to that statement when looked at too concretely (it’s going too far to suggest that all a violated woman needs is a nice, gentle lover to put the bloom back to her) but—and I think you get this in a more felt sense of the film’s narrative—I think Conehead finds something discarded and, symbolically, the film expresses that the violence done by Richard is not what defines the woman, that though she was degraded and we even witnessed the degradation, there is no need to think that she has in any way been robbed of the basic, intimate and pleasurable opportunity of finding some connection, even finding it in terms of the same act (superficially) as the one that violated her.

    A:                     So, though she was in no way cognizant of encountering the second male, you suggest (I just want to be sure) that this might be representative of a kind of clean slate—her reduction to inanimate discard is a kind of…symbolic repositioning of her, suggesting she doesn’t need to first consciously access what she encountered with the first male, she can, like in a dream, wake up to a new (completely removed from sequential experience) self and a more natural, humanistically deserved one?

    C:         Why are you smiling?  I kind of agree, yeah, except you’re obviously having a go at me.

    A:                     I’m smiling because you’ve become the inverse of yourself.  I get what you mean, but of course after she is re-animated and the clock strikes one and the film expresses that Conehead’s fantasia of nurturing of intimacy found, of sitting at the bar, laughing and kissing and having a real lover, is not going to happen, the woman (in the film’s only moment of direct dialogue, which I think is very important) flatly, even coyly, say ‘That’ll be one hundred dollars,’ revealing that her identity was neither lost by the violence done to her nor was it incorrectly determined by Richard, to begin with.

    C:                     Well. I do have to admit I did de-emphasize that, you’re right.

    A:                     You seem blue.  You wanted them to be a happy couple?

    C:                     You paint the picture bleaker than me. I guess I was trying to build a narrative of potential redemption out of it, while you rather well (if bullyingly) present a strong case of the blanket amorality of it all.

    A:                     Well, chin up for a minute, don’t let’s lose steam, okay?  Let’s redirect and try to understand this expression of Female—who is she, this Young Girl?

    C:                     But see, this is also why I’m blue, because I have to wonder if it’s proper, in a strict sense, to say that there even is an expression of Female, of genuine female, in the piece.  It was, after all, written by a man and realized by another man, so at best don’t you think it’s all an expression of a conceptualization of the female through the masculine persona, and therefore even more demoralizing, even more predatory an expression?

    A:                     It is a predatory expression, but I don’t know, I don’t think that men can’t express things actual about aspects of femininity.  Moreover, though, are you kind of slyly positing that femininity is, at base, not supposed to admit to predatory aspects?  All I said was it was the is, in part, an exploration of the predatory aspects of masculinity, I didn’t say that such aspects equate to immorality.  Do you think they do—in the case of either masculinity or femininity?

    C:                     What’s the question?

    A:                     Tell me what you think of the woman in this film.

    C:                     I guess I think, at best,   she’s a self-aware and a self-serving persona, manipulating the baser, unavoidable aspects of the men she encounters/lures, no matter what their predilections—that in fact she is appreciative of whatever predilection, as the more reduced a male can be made the easier the male can be utilized—and, at worst, she is an adrift individual who seems to lack the wherewithal to affect any internally, self-realized aspect of herself and so accepts her presence as objectified entity as a means of survival, even of definition, almost in an evolutionarily unconscious way accepting survival-as-identity and the particulars of that survival as immaterial.

    A:                     Jesus, no wonder you sense undercurrents of chauvinism in the film, listen to you!  I’m not trying to sound like a talk-doctor here, but I think you’re filtering yourself through this film and not this film through yourself.

    C:                     You mean what I just said was chauvinist?  Those are chauvinist attitudes?

    A:                     ‘At best she is a self-aware, self-serving persona’—even without the rest of what you layered on, that’s a limited interpretation, especially of the best of something.  What I was saying a moment ago was that I wasn’t positing predatory as either moral or immoral—not even as amoral—but what you seem to be saying about the particular female on evidence in this film, is that even her predatory aspects (which I’m granting you admitted to even though you only did so implicitly) are kind of ho-hum, just what she wound up with.  To simplify what you said: she is either aware she’s a whore (at best) or is a whore but not aware of it (at worst).

    C:                     You’re more than a little bit manipulating my description.  If I literally approach the femininity in the film through the filter of prostitution and through the accepted (even relished) celebration of prostitution-as-sexuality, yeah, I identify the woman—this woman in this film, not women—as a whore, but I think, to be concrete, that it’s more than that.  As you pointed out, in the concluding moment of the film, the only moment where a character is technically given voice, direct dialogue, she defines herself as such, and so is and has been in control of the entire chain of emotional circumstances, this admission of hers denuding her of the identity either of victim, corpse, or… renewed life.  She begins the film as a prostitute, then for awhile kind of has this identity brought into question by the fact that she is brutalized and then is nurtured, but very pointedly she reasserts the identity at the end, willfully, even antagonistically.

    A:                     You’re right.  I was teasing you and did so to the detriment of an exploration of the film.  But you’ve side-stepped the larger question of whether the film is expressing femininity as predatory.

    C:                     It is.

    A:                     So, taking the film as a larger expression: if the men are, so to speak, ensnared without their even being aware of it, doesn’t the film express a kind of sympathetic thrust toward men-as-predatory—they might think they are predators, but they aren’t even in control or aware of enough of the world to be genuinely predatory and by extension (an extension I think the film expresses over and over) genuinely whole.  And returning to this earlier point from a different vantage, maybe this is why the insistence on two individuated actors to represent Male, while only one woman for Female.

    C:                     You mean the film infantilizes men, but does so by kind of…what? Demonizing women?  At least as far as the controlling point-of-view being sexuality?

    A:                     Well…not demonize, I don’t think. By making the subject matter so lurid and the struggle so all-encompassing (even, as you pointed out well, reducing the world not involved in the sexual-as-predatory into androgynous pedestrians, mutes, standers-by) the female is elevated, is elevated through having to be fully realized as an individual, an identity with multiple, conflicting attributes.  She will be both sides of every coin, she is fully fleshed and made complex in the acceptance of the contradictory aspects inside her single persona. The men, though, (or The Male) have to be either this or that, one thing, not the other—infantilized, sure, reduced to iconography which can be named (Richard Nixon, Conehead). The predatory male sexuality either destroys or revives, gives or takes—the predatory female sexuality defines, full stop, it owns, doesn’t rent.

    C:                     Isn’t that what I’d said from the start?

    A:                     No.  I’d have agreed with you were that the case.

  • Fast And Furious 6 – Review

    Fast And Furious 6 – Review

    Cars. Fucking cars. Big cars. Smooth cars. American cars. Vin Diesel in cars. The Rock in bigger cars. Fast cars. Fastest cars. English cars. Crashing cars. Smashing cars. A fucking tank. Flying cars. Flipping cars. Furious cars. Silly cars. Cars. CARS. Caaaaaaaaaars. CAAAAARRRRRRRSSSSSSS!! And occasionally motorbikes.

    Considering that my knowledge of cars extends only as far as knowing that a) they have four wheels except when they don’t, and b) they sometimes come in red, I should really hate the Fast and Furious franchise and for a while I was happy to oblige.

    They always struck me as equal parts creepy and desperate, struggling with all their might to sell me this cultish lifestyle of vehicular bacchanalia. “Ride or die” they growled at me, these cow-bodied car-men, flexing their big boy muscles in their little boy vests, sipping their beers and fondling their women (those poor women – glass-eyed slatterns, trying to remember their mothers’ pleading face and how their childhood bedroom smelled, only ever of value when plaintively rubbing their bums against cars with a lost, bewildered frenzy, like they knew, like they just knew that if they ever stop rubbing and bumping and flopping their silly limbs about like shoelaces in a storm, if they ever stopped for even an instant, their hearts would simply break). These films seemed the propaganda of a thug religion and I wanted no part of it.

    But then Fast and the Furious 5 decided it would rather be a fun heist movie instead.

    Also, and this can’t be over-stated, the Rock was in it, and he’s the size of two men glued together, both equally furious about being glued together and determined to enact said fury upon the world via the twin pain delivery systems that The Rock keeps at the ends of his arms. 5 didn’t take itself seriously and spent all of the time it normally wastes on depicting the drag race scene (a hive of silly pants’d wankers) on fun things like stunt choreography and weighty, well-shot vehicular mayhem.

    So it’s with a heavy heart that I report that Fast and Furious 6 doesn’t seem to have entirely learned its lesson from its dumb but fun older brother. We seem to be back in Feelings Country, and none of the cast speak the language. Vin Diesel’s ex, Michelle Rodriguez is back and working for a local ne’erdowell called Who The Fuck Cares. Why is she a villain now? She’s been diagnosed with bump-on-the-noggin amnesia and remembers sweet Betty Buggerall about Vin and the gang, although how in the entire realm of medical science a lady could ever forget being seen to by Vin Diesel is something I cannot and will not fathom.

    This shocking character development either confuses, irritates or amuses Vin Diesel. It’s hard to tell, because of his face. Vin Diesel is good at many things – sipping Coronas, wearing vests, having a car under his arse – but making with the Human Feels isn’t one of them, and the fact that this movie wastes so much time on brooding sucks a lot of the previously-attained joy and momentum from its engine. Brotherhood, the drag racing scene, Ride or Die, all these po-faced ‘themes’ come back, it’s all trying too hard and it’s all getting in the way of my fun.

    There are moments of unintentional comedy though. Paul Walker has a kid in this movie, and he and Vin Diesel compete over who can force the poor thing to love cars the most in a startling case of nurture performing a hit and run on nature. There’s also a seduction scene where Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez compare scars and sexual encounters, all of which manages to be less sexy than hearing a sex offender whisper your home address to you over the phone.

    It doesn’t help either that The Rock doesn’t get to do much of the action stuff this time around. As 5‘s antagonist his job was to match Vin Diesel fist and kick, and his presence was a kinetic slab of happiness. 6, however, pegs him as a fellow good guy and seeing as the movie is already overstuffed with Good Guys, he’s relegated to briefings, quips and one nice fight at the end. The Rock’s a charming man, and has a more commanding presence than a testicle in a salad, but he’s wasted here.

    The plot’s a whisper at a fireworks display too. Who The Fuck Cares wants to get his hands on a Who The Fuck Cares, and Vin Diesel decides that that’s not going down. Not in Vin’s World. And then cars happens.

    But that’s Fast and Furious 6‘s trump card. When cars be smashing, Adam be clappin’, and the movie still knows its way around a high octane chase or two. The London car scenes are shot too dark and too shaky-cam’d to be truly exciting rather than dizzying, but there’s a gorgeously daft highway set-piece in Spain (featuring a staggering amount of civilian murder that crosses from horror into parody and back into horror again) and Haywire‘s Gina Carano and The Raid‘s Joe Taslim can more than shoulder the burden of a fight scene, despite having otherwise thankless roles.

    It’s in these action set-pieces that the film flies. They are absurd, never allowing logic or human taste to restrain the bigger, the badder, the harder, the faster. One scene takes place on a plane, speeding down the single longest runway in human history. I actually worked this one out. The pilots proclaim their plane to be “at takeoff speed” (it’s a big plane, so let’s average it out at 180mph) for the entirety of the scene, which runs for 13 minutes in real time. That means the runway must have been at least 39 miles long. Just to give you some perspective, if you ran a straight line from the most western point of London to the most eastern, that line would only be 35 miles long.

    Ultimately, the action nonsense outweighs the brooding nonsense and I’m not about to deny a recommendation, however slight, to a movie that features The Rock and Vin Diesel performing a Doomsday Device (look it up) on a hapless villain. You already know if you like Fast and Furious 6 and frankly whatever you’re expecting, be it trash or treasure, you’re not wrong. I just hope that the end-credits-promised Fast and Furious 7 remembers that when we take our seats in the cinema – as I inevitably will – that we’re not looking for a movie about fast cars, just a movie that has fast cars in it.

     

    EDIT – All roads lead to this…Pre-order Fast & Furious 6 now! Get the extreme action and reckless stunts on the first day of release by pre-ordering from Amazon.co.uk . Fast & Furious 6, is released on Blu-ray™ and DVD – both with UltraViolet™ from 16th September, 2013.

  • Review: The Great Gatsby

    Review: The Great Gatsby

    The Great Gatsby Tells the Story of Nick Carroway (Tobey Maguire), a frustrated writer turned bonds salesman, who becomes entwined in the lives of the New York super-rich in the  booming 20’s, and in particular his mysterious and uber wealthy neighbour Jay Gatsby (Leonardo Di Caprio), who despite seemingly having everything a man could want, desires the one thing he can’t have, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), the wife of boorish millionaire Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). As Gatsby pursues Daisy at all costs, Nick finds the world of the privileged not all it seemed to be. Hilarity ensues?

    I’m generally against adaptations of literary classics. I know that’s a bizarre opinion to form let alone take a stand on, but if you look at it solely from the perspective of the movie, they’ve just got nowhere to go. At best they can be an acceptable, professionally made slideshow imitation of the original novel, they can still win awards and there is certainly an audience for them, but they can never approach the inspiration or the value of the original work. Too much reverence is required and too much respect is demanded. So more often then not they become a copy of a copy, reiterating what was once genius until it becomes ordinary to sell tickets.

    So take that biased philosophy with the knowledge that this would be directed by Baz Luhrmann, a director not without an eye for visual splendor but pretty much without an eye for emotionally engaging storytelling, and the trailer, which played up the art deco decadence and made the thing look like a particularly expansive rap video. I can’t say my expectations were particularly high. But I tried my best to disregard my psychic ability as nonsense and go into the movie with an open mind, and for all his faults and flawed movies I do believe that Luhrmann has something to offer as a director. I’m a fan of Moulin Rouge, for all its gaudy excesses and lack of subtlety. It felt like a film-maker at the top of his game, every frame filled with confidence and intent. It felt like a genuinely modern take on a genre that has struggled to fit into the world of modern cinema, and one shot beautifully from top to bottom. Before and since that though, Luhrmann has struggled to find his place in movies. A director who likes big-budget excess but with an apparent disinterest in shooting  PG-13 action, AKA pretty much the only place where big-budget excess is tolerated these days, his career has seemed a bit lost.

    Australia, a failure by any measurement, seemed like a plea for the return of the spectacle and style of old Hollywood, Adventure over action, lovable rogues over comic book heroes. Perhaps the era Luhrmann would have done best in. And in many ways The Great Gatsby is a continuation of that. A third consecutive film set in the early 1900’s, Luhrmann is on safer and securer ground here as he turns to an adaptation as opposed to an original work, knowing he’ll be given slightly more leeway, but at the same time he also stumbles into his greatest weakness as a storyteller, which is telling a coherent and complex emotional story without relying on pageantry and misdirection. And it he just gets it all wrong. He doesn’t seem to get what an intimate story The Great Gatsby is until the final forty minutes, after he’s shot all he can of the roaring Twenties set to Fergie and Jay-Z on the soundtrack. The film backdates its emotional core, to the point where the exposition and emotional dilemma come flying at you, and scenes which are no doubt supposed to emotionally devastate fall flat because they come to quickly and have not been earned. Luhrmann used this source material for his own purposes, to revel again in early 20th century visual excess, but he’s short changed the story’s darker elements, the story’s satirical elements and in many ways its soul,  to do so. Which is mightily ironic really when you think about it.

    All this is a shame really, because Leonardo Di Caprio is fantastic as Gatsby, and probably single handedly saves this film from being an outright disaster. He perfectly conveys the sensitivity and single-mindedness of the character, remaining likable and admirable whilst not short changing the weaknesses of the character. It’s just about as strong and anchoring performance as a film like this could ask for, and it papers over the cracks of the unfocused and messy structure of the movie. The Supporting performers have more mixed results, with Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carroway a passenger in the story by design, and thus not really getting much to do beyond comment on what is going on. I thought Maguire was solid enough though. Carey Mulligan, an actress I’m a big fan of usually, seems to struggle a bit with both the accent and not crossing the line into over the top territory. I didn’t think she was awful, but its certainly not her best performance. The rest, in true Lurhmann style, come across as larger than life caricatures, from Joel Edgerton’s boorish rich boy to Jason Clarke’s alcoholic mechanic to Elisabeth Debicki’s Katherine Hepburn impression. I generally could have done with a lot more restraint with these characters, a couple of whom are integral to the story and need to be taken somewhat seriously to pull of what needs to be pulled of later, particularly Edgerton, who needed to display a slight indication of intelligence before the character was required by the story to be the smartest guy in the room. Unconvincing.

    I don’t think this movie is terrible, Di Caprio’s performance and Luhrmann’s undoubted eye for spectacle means their are things to enjoy here. There are even things to be impressed by here. But arguably for this story to be done the most justice, certain aspects of the Luhhmann repertoire needed to mature. He needed to be more comfortable with stillness, with allowing the actors to sell the scene instead of trying to do it for them. But none of that really happened and his version of The Great Gatsby is exactly what the cynic in me would have expected it to be. Synthetically beautiful but hollow, with Di Caprio bailing the movie out of being complete mess. I understand why on paper it looked like Luhrmann and The Great Gatsby was a sure thing, but its actually a horrible pairing. A story that condemns the soullessness of excess of the 20’s told by a man who’s spent most of his career reveling in it. The movie has made money, so Luhrmann will get at least one more shot at a big budget yet, but I hope he finds something that caters more to his apparently undeniable limitations as well as his obvious strengths.

    Rating: 5/10

  • Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: The Short Films Of Director Norman Reedus (1 Of 4)

    Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: The Short Films Of Director Norman Reedus (1 Of 4)

    Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus
    No. 1: INTRODUCTION
    by Pablo D’Stair

    NOTES: (1) This series originally appeared in the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka) in September/October of 2011. The paperback and FREE E-BOOK has now been re-issued by Pocketful Of Scoundrel (an Imprint of KUBOA). (2) Though not essential to the reading of this series, the three films by Norman Reedus being discussed are available through Big Bald Head Productions

    Concrete:         Very quickly, to have it out of the way, I think we should agree with each other, as Godard asked the others at the Cahiers du Cinema roundtable concerning Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour to do, that we will be discussing Cinema as Literature.

    Abstract:                      Certainly. And thankfully I think this is less of a suggestive stretch these days—not that we’re very likely to proceed using established terms-of-art or anything, no scholarly patter, but I think the agreement is less a radical thing, these days, that Cinema—not movies, but Cinema—is literature, without having to be broken into its component parts, that the result of cinema on an individual, so to speak, can be perfectly equated to the result of any form of written-word literature.

    C:                     And just to put the pin in it—so that the idea isn’t understood too out in the ether—I’ll just say that most specifically we won’t be concerned with review or even really critique of any kind. Art is to be responded to, we will respond to it, and this response is best to be kept in flux, not strangled into some pronouncement or another.

    A:                     Which is precisely why (I suppose we should move on to explaining) the form of self-interview has been adopted.  Cinema—and quite in particular the short cinema of Norman Reedus under discussion here—is something not meant to elicit a single reaction-per-viewer, but something that should unhinge a viewer—maybe rather say an observer—into a contemplation, and the very flow of that contemplation, the paths and side paths and side-side paths it wanders is the reaction. It would be a mistake to take the form even of analytical essay when discussing these films, in that even if multiple perspectives are brought in, it is quite difficult to avoid in that format, just through structure and incidental, the notion of there being primary and subordinate reactions/observations. With any individual, there is no primary and subordinate in the multiple responses to a work of art and it is certainly folly to allow any suggestion otherwise.

    C:                     There’s no other way to approach it with Reedus’ work, certainly, and with short film in general, even more so, I would say, than long form cinema.

    A:                     Mmn.  Well.  We’ll touch on that a bit here and there, but we’d better step carefully not to set up short film as subordinate or alternative or footnote to long-form, I’d think.

    C:                     And you’re right, I stepped into the trap I was warning against.

    A:                     So maybe despite the titular presence of the term short films in this series we’ll just refer to the works as films? Do you agree?

    C:                     I do.  And with that out of the way, the matter of self-introduction should take place and I’ll go first.  I am the Concrete Reaction or, to put it another way, I am the reaction based on and held in by the concrete aspects of each of the three films we will be discussing.  My compatriot, Abstract, has a tendency—neither good nor bad—to take certain aspects of or moments in a given film and to investigate and propound on them outside of the tethered whole of the single piece of cinema.  That is what I consider a film: a single piece of cinema—each moment, while it can be individuated, actually exerts a specific and important gravity on the others.  In a sense, I suggest that films have rules—rules they set themselves, but rules—so that if a moment late in the film seems to be about something when taken as its own singular expression, I suggest that what has come before and what comes after must be considered, and in no incidental way, to truly get this moment in particular. Just for one example, there.  I don’t let Abstract wander too far out into the ether, making points—fine as they may be—that are just general riffs of philosophy, I keep this discussion, as far as I am able (and at the risk of being unpopular, here) grounded by and in the actual films as they are, not the films they may be or might have been et cetera.

    A:                     Well—if kind of repetitiously—put.  And picking up from that, I am the Abstract Reaction—I introduce myself by touching on the fact that while a film may well be considered a singular entity—and I do consider films such, though Concrete doesn’t seem to accept this—the undeniable tension, even in something singular, between the conscious and the unconscious elements of its origination does necessitate, and necessitate often, an examination outside of letting one part of the film influence the other, in that undercurrents or stories-within-particular-moments should be isolated and not really so flatly considered only as part of the linear, conscious construction of filmmaking.  Which is to say that, sure, as Concrete would have it, one could not argue that a scene of a man giving his girlfriend a necklace and telling her ‘I love you’ should be seen as happy in the face of other scenes in the film of the fellow being adulterous or physically abusive or something, but it is not to say that, really, a kind of isolation and exploration of that excised moment of intimacy should not be explored.  Only more so—and Reedus’ films aren’t as simplistic as that example.  Just as much as the conscious elements of a film help define it or set rules, so do the suggestive, unconscious-moments-in-abstraction, and indeed these moments—which sometimes in the face of the conscious/linear-whole may just seem glitches, flourishes, little quirks amounting to nothing—actually do inform the conscious and, at times, unspool it.

    C:                     And you’ll make it clear what any of that means if and when it comes up?

    A:                    Yes, I will—and it might be easier to do it in the moment as opposed to—

    C:                     In the abstract?

    A:                     Yes. Ha ha.  You have the benefit of simplicity in introducing yourself—concrete specifics can be discussed even in the absence of concrete specifics, right?  Doesn’t make a bit of difference.  My lot is based, counter intuitively as it might seem, on direct stimuli.  But maybe we should move along?

    C:                     I think we should.  I led last time, so have at it.

    A:                     The series of films we will be discussing—three in number, The Rub, A Filthy Little Fruit, and I Thought Of You—we are going to be coming at, primarily, by treating them as commentaries on Identity, the flux of identity, the impermanence and, I would go so far as to say, the morality of identity, or the morality of selected identity, at any rate.  Much of what we discuss will center on particular moments in the films and much will focus on broader, even impressionistic response. But I think Reedus, both in the most basic script aspect of the films (some scripts he wrote, some he did not) and in the more volatile actuality of the technique and imagery used, seems fairly obsessed with the notion of identity, often filtering it through myriad layers of grime, of thoughtlessness, of choice-and-anti-choice—identity in flux, darting character-to-character (or fracturing single characters into multiple) and identity as situation, by which I mean that an overall tone of a film, even if the film contains multiple individuals really seems a commentary on The Individual, writ large.

    C:                     Just cutting in with a question, alright?  Do you think it is Reedus who ‘seems fairly obsessed’ or do you think it is the films which seem this way, or is it just we as reactors who do? Just as a point of clarity.

    A:                     Right you are.  Reedus’ actual intentions, thoughts, ideas are somewhat irrelevant in this discussion—not as a slight, but as a philosophical absolute. The artists’ intentions are little to do with the audiences’ reaction and, indeed, nothing to do with the statement of the actualized artwork. I mean, Reedus might’ve intended to create a romantic comedy with The Rub but no matter how much that was his intention, the film on display is nothing of the kind.

    C:                     And to be less simplistic—and quickly pointing out that he did not, literally, intend The Rub to be a romantic comedy—even if Reedus did not think the films were meditations or explorations of identity it’s irrelevant to the examination of art—the examination of art is the examination of reaction to art, if we are being truthful with ourselves.

    A:                     Certainly, the originator is the most helpless (or hopeless) at being able to access or interpret their work.  They made it, that is their interpretation of something outside of it and after that they are reduced, removed.  I agree.

    C:                     And from my vantage point I want to hammer home that removing the idea of Reedus’ intention etc. is kind of essential due to the irrevocably collaborative aspect of these films.  In some instances, he wrote them, but in others not—so already there, flatly, Reedus’ intentions and the intentions of the writer and the intentions of performers (to keep moving out with this idea) and the intentions of the musicians or the cinematographer (when Reedus did not serve in that role, also) have no choice but to be different things and so the film is too multiple in expression to be said to be saying any one thing.  Kind of a kindergarten statement about film, but easy to overlook, even as casually as to say ‘Reedus’ intention’ when we are discussing our reaction to a whole of which Reedus, intentions et al., is only component.  Are we going to swap theories on the role of director and all of that?

    A:                     I wasn’t thinking to, no.  We’d wind up coming off sounding like blowhards, I think, failing miserably, laughably, as did David Mamet in his abhorrent On Directing Films. A consideration such as that, especially in the face of discussing Art, is death and folly.

    C:                     Mamet did make kind of a fool of himself there, yeah?

    A:                     Only in his choice of defining—he, for example, seems to have a mix-up between storytelling and filmmaking between movie and film.  This is why it was so pointed to take up the Cinema-is-Literature stance as we did right away, because literature (film) such as Reedus’ is not the sort of thing to be treated as a movie. ‘Will the audience like this?’ and such questions I doubt very much were a concern—it’d be like imagining Jorgen Leth is disappointed that The Perfect Human didn’t do as good at the box office as Paul Blart: Mall Cop, you know?

    C:                     Sure.  And at least we got a good point out of that aside.  Pleasure or enjoyment in the lowest-common-denominator sense (even in the general sense) is not what we’re concerning ourselves with, nor is it what we think these films are interested in.  They certainly aren’t inviting, they certainly aren’t solicitous, and if we were to examine them as pieces meant to casually engage or to reveal themselves to viewers nothing would come of it.

    A:                     No. They are contained, permanent.  The static artwork I think it might’ve been Joyce was always going on about.  Even in certain…what could be interpreted as pornographic elements (I don’t say that term exactly fits the films, but to cut to the chase I admit I think it certainly is something to be considered in some instances, even if to be moved away from) the films reveal that salaciousness and/or titillation is not on the menu, that instead things laid bare and elemental and lingered on without regard for sentiment serve equally to disquiet, repel, intrigue and stir.

    C:                     Even as flatly as the presence of sexuality in The Rub (which is I imagine what you are referring to, in particular) this aspect acts more as its inverse.

    A:                     Or, indeed—not to put words in your mouth—it could be said that the films often, if not always, utilize a kind of inversion-of-comfortable-symbolism to get at their point.  The presence of something seemingly disturbing, for example, which the film might seem to be wrongly indicating as a soporific element, might, on investigation, actually be meant to be a soporific element and not something disturbing at all, thus putting a buzzing into the mix, disorienting a casually interpretive audience member.

    C:                     Other than I don’t exactly know what soporific means—or if you’re using the word correctly if it means what I think it might—I’m with you.  Exactly.

    A:                     The films often uses the opposite to mean the actual and the audience being put in the position of having to perpetually reorient itself mirrors the headspace of the films.  ‘They are what they seem like, even if they say they aren’t,’ to make a phrase of it.

    C:                     And soporific comes into this how?

    A:                     Balm-like—what first seems to be introduced as a comforting, stabilizing element and then might appear to be perverse, might really, despite the visual presence of the perverse, be expressing comfort, calm, stability, correctness and commonness.

    C:                     Point that out when it happens.

    A:                     I’m thinking of I Thought Of You most specifically.

    C:                     Bring it up when we’re talking about I Thought Of You, then.

    A:                     I will.  And please, by all means, do feel free to bring any of your own thoughts up, too, I’d be interested to know some specific aspect of what you’re thinking, as long as we’re both here.

    C:                     Reedus himself, just to give those unfamiliar with him some loose reference—or would you like to do this bit?

    A:                     Seems better suited to you.

    C:                     Norman Reedus himself, while a filmmaker, photographer and just all around variable artist, is best known as an actor.  Though he’s been around for quite some time and turning in fantastic work in usually quite artful, outside-of-the-establishment-films, cutting out a solid identity as a gifted character actor, he’s unfortunately most known for some of his more current, mainstream work—one of the two leads in the Boondock Saints franchise, a regular role on the American television series The Walking Dead and an appearance as Judas in a recent video by musician/performance artist Lady Gaga.

    A:                     Not unfortunate in that his work in these was bad, certainly you don’t mean to say.

    C:                     No, no.  Unfortunate in that I don’t run into many people who seem aware of him as an artist but run into slews of somewhat vapid individuals who know him as the guy who was awesome in that Boondocks movie or young ladies with an older man fetish who are keen on the contemporary US zombie genre.

    A:                     That just sounds like jealousy, there.

    C:                     I say unfortunate primarily because, in my opinion, a more mainstream presence tends to dilute the impactfulness of outside-the-mainstream pursuits, what always get labeled secondary artistic pursuits.  So, the more generic name recognition he has, the less likely his filmmaking (particularly of the nature of these three we are discussing) is to be seen as anything except a hobbyist’s pursuit—you see it all the time, as though if someone is recognized and gains success as a celebrity in one vein they are expected to firmly stick to the story that that is their heart and soul and anything else—music, photography, writing, etc.—is like someone playing a game.  Reedus, as a filmmaker, does not seem to be at all interested in having a laugh, it does not seem the films he makes are mere follies or halfhearted stabs at something for the sake of self-aggrandizing, they don’t come off as just a thing he does that should rightfully be shrugged off to better focus on the comic book adaptations of some film he was in, you know?

    A:                     Sure.  I second that.  I also would not want this discussion to be looked at as a quaint fluff piece examining the secondary residue of a celeb.  Point taken.

    C:                     If Tom Cruise was all of a sudden to say he was a filmmaker, even if he came out with Persona or Epidemic those would still just be looked on, for the most part, as those weird movies Jerry McGuire made.

    A:                     Sure.  Did you want to dwell on this point much longer, or were we moving on?

    C:                     I’ll move on—and I think I should field this last bit.  It should be pointed out that, while a familiarity with the films under discussion here is not essential to following this series, it is rather encouraged.  As some of the commentary in this series will dwell particularly on atmosphere and specific variations in film technique (not through usage of technical terminology, but by way of descriptivism) it would only be beneficial to have actually seen the films.

    A:                     Closing thoughts, now?  Or closing introductory thoughts?

    C:                     Please.

    A:                     A reiteration, on my part, of the fact that the interface with art, the coupling with art, can only result in a Reaction-to-Art (opinions are silly and nothing to do with art) and that while some particular object of art may be the namesake, the totem under discussion/scrutiny, it is always and only the reaction itself which is being examined—this is central to the design of art (not just of creation, as not everything is art, I’m going to have to emphatically say) and so the purpose of any of my remarks—and likely any of Concrete’s remarks—is not to define, but to explore.

    C:                     And as much as what Abstract says there is (or may be) true, the actual understanding of the components, workings, and nuances of an artwork do have to be examined outside of the protective umbrella of art, least one simply assign the identity of art to something not only not befitting it but not desiring it, leading to the only folly I feel can come of an interface with a subject matter, namely: to believe that everything can be said to be the same, when nothing—nothing—is the same, even one thing in the eyes of a single individual.

    A:                     You’re sounding like me, there—careful.

    C:                     Heaven forbid.

  • Summer Scars: Trouble In The Woods

    Summer Scars: Trouble In The Woods

    Summer Scars is the one-hour production by Julian Richards, setting itself amongst others of the ‘Broken Britain’ genre.

    The story is set in Wales and follows a group of young delinquents as they enjoy a day of hot-rodding in the local forest. They soon come across Peter (Kevin Howarth), a seemingly harmless man who enjoys joining in their fun. But as he gains their trust what becomes apparent is his true prerogative when they find themselves trapped in a hostage situation.

    Although the film has been lumped with others raising the same issue of British youth, the characters here are a little more believable and a little less threatening. Although the group do get involved with some underage drinking and mild violence, unlike the extreme criminals from films such as Eden Lake and Harry Brown, what is portrayed is the fact that they are just kids and this progresses as Peter’s games become increasingly risky. For the age they are, the actors and actress playing the group do a great job of rendering their helplessness onto the screen, being described as “impressive acting,” from The Independent. Howarth also does a stand up job of playing the psycho in the woods, giving just the right amount of unhinged initially to raise suspicion and slowly developing into a truly fearful and believable performance.

    The idea from the movie stemmed from an event in Richard’s child hood, which is perhaps why he was able to create such tension from scene to scene. Even the forest in which it was set becomes like a prison and creates an incredibly claustrophobic air to the viewer. Despite having little budget to play with, Richards has successfully made a film that could have easily been hyperbolised and for that the movie has received great reviews, being described as a mixture between Kidulthood and Stand By Me.

    It’s an entertaining and well-made film with a decent and thankfully not overly complicated plot. Not only this but it fulfills its goal in creating a tense watch that will leave you falling off the edge of your seat.