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Too much talking.

by Jack Kentala

I always make this mental comparison between Twilight and Harry Potter. Whereas the latter mostly concerns itself with an often-overwhelming (for the movie adaptations, at least) combination of wizardry and secrets, the back end of the movies have this little concern about Harry Potter growing up and falling in love and all that. Twilight takes the opposite route: there are vampires and werewolves, sure, but it all hangs in the balance of a very poorly construct human-vampire-werewolf love triangle.

And that’s what ultimately makes any Twilight film seem a bit flat for those outside the tween-girl demographic. The love triangle is pure nonsense because Werewolf Jacob really has nothing on Vampire Edward. If anyone who has any inkling of the series can’t just guess what’ll happen with the love interest(s) has a serious problem analyzing movie posters and seeing that most promotional material has helpless Bella absolutely smitten with Edward and flatly saying she loves Jacob, too, but a bit less.

One aspect about the series that, given it’s the year 2010, really grinds me is the puritanical stance related to sex. Yeah, there’s plenty of lip-locking time with Edward and, briefly, Jacob, but it’s almost stated as a given that Bella doesn’t want to have sex until she’s married. And it just so happens that she’s going to get married when she’s 17; that’s what age my grandmother was when she married, and even back then it was young by most standards, and that, too, was a no-sex-before-marriage sort of thing. So Eclipse takes the odd stance of allowing marital sex, but it doesn’t matter if you get that free pass because you’re married at a freakishly young age.

I guess a bonus point can be given for a very brief conversation in which Bella’s dad gives sideways permission for her and Edward to have sex as long as they use condoms, but the way Bella dismisses it is like she’s the one with this whitewashed, not-realistic-these-days stance. I know it’s been a criticism lobbied at Twilight and other inavoidable zeitgeists, like the Jonas Brothers and their Promise Rings, and how it’s an easy way to sell sex under the guise that it’s “safe” because there’s no explicit sex and there are silly rings and all that. (I won’t even get into the subconscious insanity of last year’s Jonas Brothers concert stunt of spraying hot semen foam out of cannons onto their audience.)

But back to, you know, the movie, it gets into a talky dead zone that drags out the time to the mildly-enjoyable vampire-werewolf brawl climax. Film is visual, so you want to show things, but the way Eclipse is set up, it’s really hard to show the love that everyone keeps talking about. It only comes close when Bella is out camping, gets really cold, and shirtless Jacob has her cuddle up to him to get warm. But there’s no risk for Jacob, so that doesn’t go far showing that he does it because he loves her. Most of the movie is a lot of talk about love that goes in circles. Again, I have no inner tween to summon to come up with a defense of this.

The first Twilight worked pretty good. Like any superhero or supernatural saga, the origin story is always the best. There are the setup and the mysteries (and, in the first Twilight, a lot of sparkly vampires and vampire baseball). Then came the dragged-out, Romeo and Juliet-obsessed New Moon, and Eclipse straddles an uncomfortable line by killing off a villain that’s been dogging the vampires of the Pacific Northwest for the first three films and sort of shrugging its shoulders in a Now What? fashion before the probably-bloated two-part finale set to release far too soon.

BUT IS IT ART? EXIT THROUGHT THE GIFT SHOP:

by Zack Oleson

Art sometimes makes me sick.  Watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, the new digital documentary directed by street artist Bansky from the exorbitant footage shot by Thierry Guetta (aka Mister Brainwash, his street artist persona), I was struck by the subject but not so much the documentary itself.  Through the first hour, I didn’t know what was going on with the delegated narrator’s unqualified and unrelenting hyperbole—another voice-over doc narrator with a mysteriously foreign therefore authoritative accent, without even a hint of irony—or the attention paid to who was behind the camera, this Thierry Guetta character.  A rather fat and unkempt Frenchman, Thierry became obsessed with capturing people and things in his life on his digital camera ostensibly after his mother died when he was very young.  He used to record celebrity sightings, then he started eyeing his cousin’s work creating tile mosaics inspired by the videogame Space Invaders.  Using that name, Thierry’s cousin started pasting his work up all around Paris, thus “street art” was seemingly born.

Street art is for the layman a thinking man’s graffiti.  The work of Banksy is arguably the most well known, considering a book of his work is sold at Urban Outfitters.  There’s also Shepherd Fairey, who was commissioned to design the iconic Obama campaign posters and whose Andre the Giant “OBEY” trademark can be spotted in almost any city.  Thierry comes to know and follow both these two (any surprise in the will-he-meet-the-reclusive-Bansky thread of narrative is undermined by the inclusion of footage of Bansky, though I suppose it is suspenseful to know how they meet), promising that he’s at work on a documentary.  Thierry’s quite a help and a lookout, and he takes hours and hours worth of footage, yet he never watches or does anything with it.  He concerns himself with preservation of change before it itself is wiped out (it is a shame there’s no scene of these posters being taken down or stencils painted over) which is a worthwhile cause, even if it is through 0’s and 1’s.  Thierry manages to get invaluable footage right before street art takes off and into the galleries and auction houses, evolving modern art to a street-aesthetic.

The shit hits the fan once Banksy asks Thierry to put his documentary together. (more…)

Saul Levine, 1969, 8mm, 7 min, silent, color

The edit is the impetus for Saul Levine’s silent seven minute short, A Note to Pati (1969). With his jaunty edit, Levine creates a unique juxtaposition of weltering, home video imagery with brush cutting gat-gat image tracing. Levine’s edit, with alacrity, leavens the film into a visual visual poem, which otherwise would simply be a few dusty 8mm reels of an individual’s home memories.

The edit is the vise of this film, and this surely is a technical edit, therefore let’s briskly analyze this film afore.

Film editor’s curiosity compelled me to watch the film multiple times while tallying the number of film splices. Clearly, it’s impossible to get an exact number, but according to my tally averaged, the film has approximately 400 splices — this is wild — this is a seven minute film.

The duration of the film is 6:51; and let’s say the film contains a 400 number of splices; 400 splices. Ripping it with math, we’ll round 6:51 to seven minutes and divide that by 400 — this equals one splice per 1.75 seconds.

Here we see the divergence of experimental/underground/avant-garde film from the Hollywood or mainstream independent film. Mainstream film editors, on occasion, have reign to experiment with the edit here and there, obligations attached, affecting their edit in a tame manner, constricting it to moments, 1-10 seconds, because they have to play it safe, because they have to ‘keep the story moving’ ‘long. Avant-garde film is A-1 because there’s experimentation, and experiments lead to discovery and newfound creation, and newfound creation is boundless — it can enkindle all sorts of tropes, and emotions, and might even dust some dusty glyphs and dusty arcana.

It’s apparent that Levine had scant amount of footage to work with, and arguably this project may have started as an editing exercise for Levine, but what is evident is that Levine’s edit leavens this footage into ink which pens a letter visual letter to a girl. Perhaps he writes to the titular Patti, perhaps he writes this letter to others or everyone, perhaps this letter is perennial.

Levine writes a letter and this letter is a letter of human movement, progress, it pushes forward. In his letter, he paints, splats, and crosscuts between images observing the movement of children whereabouts wintry white hills and the snowy front of a homestead; particular focus drawn on a child in red, and a lingering shot of a bird in a tree. The mise-en-scène of the film is a punctuating red against snow white — red and purity — linked with the sturdy, organic color of brown. Mother earth. Mother Earth earth and whatever place we feel at home.

The film lingers most on the images of the child in red, the movement and shoveling and excavating of snow,  children with snow, and the bird in the tree. Gluing this imagery together is the splicing of black leader flashes, film splice marks, deformed celluloid, and sometimes 1 to 5 frames of weltering camera movements of extreme-close-ups that tumble all over the screen, throwing eye-tracers hither and thither.

Near the end is an image sequence worth ponder: children sledding; the main child in red frolics in the snow, lots of forward movement, and subsequently the child is warm-washed by sunlight.

In the closing shot, the standalone treetop bird flies away toward something. The same closing shot caps with a pan-left to the sturdy trunk of a tree, solidly rooted in the earth’s soil.

From a narrative standpoint, Levine’s letter is multivalent; however, the editing in A Note to Patti constructs a lovely letter of human progress, writing of the parallel existence of human life and all life housed by mother earth; a friendship us humans, consciously or subconsciously, share with mother earth and all living creatures. That is one person’s subjective interpretation vis-a-vis this film stripped of its constructivist edit just be an old, dusty 8mm home movie.

More:

Saul Levine on Vimeo

Saul Levine on Mubi (formally the auteurs)

Harvard Film Archive: Recent Restorations, including the films of Saul Levine

January 2010: The Film Society of the Lincoln Film Center conducts an avant-garde film and video poll:

FSLFC’s Preface: In the past decade, the making and showing of experimental film worldwide has gone from strength to strength, so much so that it can be categorically said that avant-garde cinema is as vital now as it has ever been. This addendum to our Jan/Feb end-of-decade wrap-up serves to acknowledge just some of the experimental film achievements of the 21st century’s first 10 years. The rankings on the three lists below were obtained through the tabulation of the number of mentions a given film or filmmaker received in poll responses from a 46-strong group of critics, programmers, and teachers.

Poll participants: Acquarello, Steve Anker, Thomas Beard, Ariella Ben-Dov, Amy Beste, Robin Blaetz, Nicole Brenez, Autumn Campbell, Fred Camper, Abigail Child, David Dinnell, Patrick Friel, David Gatten, Jacqueline Goss, Ed Halter, Alexander Horwath, Kristin M. Jones, Chris Kennedy, Nellie Killian, Lewis Klahr, Irina Leimbacher, Scott MacDonald, Matt McCormick, Mark McElhatten, Kevin McGarry, Don McMahon, Olaf Möller, Oona Mosna, Pablo de Ocampo, Susan Oxtoby, Andréa Picard, Tony Pipolo, Steve Polta, J.R. Rigsby, Jeremy Rossen, Lynne Sachs, Keith Sanborn, Michael Sicinski, Josh Siegel, P. Adams Sitney, Gavin Smith, Phil Solomon, Scott Stark, Chris Stults, Jim Supanick, Genevieve Yue

THE RESULTS

At Sea (2007) by Peter Hutton

BEST AVANT-GARDE FILMS & VIDEO 2000-2009

1. At Sea Peter Hutton, U.S., 2007 (18)
2. Pitcher of Colored Light Robert Beavers, U.S./Switz., 2007 (16)
3. ( ) Morgan Fisher, U.S., 2003 (15)
tie Ah Liberty! Ben Rivers, U.K., 2008 (15)
tie Observando el Cielo Jeanne Liotta, U.S., 2007 (15)
tie Star Spangled to Death Ken Jacobs, U.S., 1956-2004 (15)
7. Ten Skies James Benning, U.S., 2004 (14)
8. The Fourth Watch Janie Geiser, U.S., 2000 (13)
tie The Heart of the World Guy Maddin, Canada, 2000 (13)
tie RR James Benning, U.S., 2007 (13)
11. Black and White Trypps Number Three Ben Russell, U.S., 2007 (12)
tie The Decay of Fiction Pat O’Neill, U.S., 2002 (12)
tie The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him Stan Brakhage, U.S., 2002 (12)
tie An Injury to One Travis Wilkerson, U.S., 2002 (12)
tie Kolkata Mark LaPore, US/India, 2005 (12)
tie 13 Lakes James Benning, U.S., 2004 (12)
17. The General Returns from One Place to Another Michael Robinson, U.S., 2006 (11)
tie Song and Solitude Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2006 (11)
19. False Aging Lewis Klahr, U.S., 2008 (10)
tie The Glass System Mark LaPore, U.S., 2000 (10)

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One of the better superhero franchises returns with the standard baggage of all superhero franchises

by Jack Kentala

It’s easy to bemoan sequels, especially for the so-called “superhero” franchise films. For comic fans, there are innumerable changes to the coveted Lore for the sake of making a compelling hour-and-a-half to two-hour movie, laden with ret-conning and character compositing and various rejiggerings that muddy the pure waters of the diehard. For the adult populace seeking to watch something slightly more entertaining than reality TV, there’s the barrier of the PG-13 rating, which requires all possible grittiness and swearing and sex to getting sanded down to something harmless enough for the 14-year-old boys in attendance, not to mention the latter usually resulting in a lowest-common-denominator, playing-to-the-moronic-masses dumbing-down of most everything. And for anyone just trying to enjoy a damn film, there’s the product placement, the unwieldy comic relief, and the nagging suspicion that they’re watching a two-hour commercial for action figures.

Rather miraculously, Iron Man has proved itself to be one of the more tolerable, watchable franchises, which I’ll just go ahead and say I believe is entirely the result of the inspired choice of casting Robert Downey Jr. and getting micro-indie (circa Swingers) turned big-budget writer-actor-director Jon Favreau to helm the show. Amazing how Favreau went from slumming it with the criminally-underseen, Swingers-spiritual-successor, small-budget mob movie Made to a gargantuan, multi-unit, multi-million moneybag like Iron Man in around fifteen years, which is about the equivalent of fifteen minutes in gated Hollywood.

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Rafaël Rozendaal is a Netherlands-based artist who creates exceptional work; his art enkindles computer art, cyberspace, and more. His work is fantastic. He also has created a great deal of concept-computer art websites. The following interview with Ed Halter was extracted verbatim from Rozendaal’s One Question Interview blog, a brilliant concept where Rozendaal interviews great artists of all mediums — each are asked only one question.

The Interview:

Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival, and he is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York.

Rozendaal: Are you an idealist?

Ed Halter: My gut reaction is to say no, despite the fact that everything about my life seems to say yes. I suppose somewhere in that disparity lies the true answer.

End of Interview.

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2009, 16mm to DV, b/w, 5 min

Action: Study opens with a young silhouette, the silhouette of Richard Keer’s daughter, as she frolics in front of an expansive body of water. This is an action study on film vis-a-vis a hyper-action study of the human body, humans, and water. The action is captured with a shaky, hand-held 16mm camera, and is exposed on a high-speed film stock (high sensitivity to light); this renders grainy and noisey, hyper-contrast black and white imagery — arguably, this draws close focus on nodes of light and dark, and forms of water and human.

Music dins. The momentum of Kerr’s cathexis steams. The inherent story streams and splashes. Kerr’s deconstruction of action seemingly leads to his daughter melding with water, present in a sequence of where the young daughter is superimposed with the body of water — perhaps the daughter is being infused with water. The images flicker and weave; the daughter melds with water and the water embraces the the body of the daughter, perhaps the existence of the daughter, perhaps the spirit of the daughter.

Action: Study appears to be one of those brilliant films where the story unfolds itself; the filmmaker is the one who takes time to go fishing, fish for the story, hook it, and reel it out of the unknown and into our world of existence, for all of us to watch, react, ponder, and interpret.

Action: Study opens tropes of unity: the unity of water and daughter; the unity of human and water.

More:

Richard Kerr’s Official Website

richard kerr on vimeo

Max Hattler, 2005, U.K. & Germany, 2 min, color

Collision is a short, award-winning animation from Max Hattler, a London-and-Germany-based animator and artist, whose work we have blogged before, e.g., 1) 1923 (2010), and 2) Live A/V Performance by Max Hattler & Noriko Okaku.  Hattler’s minimalist approach to graphical forms, pattern, and the RGB color palette are bright.

Collision deploys a deft arsenal of shapes on path, stars-and-kaliedoscope-striping geometry, with textures and forms culled from the ensigns of Americana and Islamism. Animators crackle and explode; pattern and cadence enkindle war paradoxes between the U.S. Government, the special interests of the U.S. Gov. (some say Israel), and their Islamic adversaries. The sound design is slick and significant, and this crackle-crisp sound imbues extrasensory depth, while punctuating the graphic.

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A week or so ago, Bad Lit, a journal of underground film, wrote this thoughtful post pertaining to the process of the underground film blogger. Mike Everleth of Bad Lit has been blogging for almost four years now, wow. Amen to running an underground film blog for four years; it’s widely published that the majority of bloggers throw in the towel after six months.

Cyber-blogging takes an enormous amount of time, and sometimes you may feel as though soaking wet in virtual reality, with liquid aluminum splashin’ and hittin’ the flow, forming metallic puddles — notwithstanding, cyber-blogging is a great time, when you have the time, and time is too expensive.

With this post, I wish to follow in the footsteps of Mike by posting a simple list of experimental/avant-garde/underground film blogs — call them whatever you like — there is a perpetual divergence of the genre definitions, but the fact is, blogs such as these are far, far, few and far between.

I encourage anyone to add a site/blog via comment, just make sure the site correlates with the aforementioned. Let us strengthen the online community of underground/experimental film sites; more people should be exposed to these. Spread the lynx around

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2007, 10:05, HDV/mini-DV/DVD. color, stereo sound

Leighton Pierce, an experimental filmmaker from Iowa City, Iowa, created this wondrous work back in 2007, way back when Sundance actually considered true experimental works, rather than just saying they do, and Number One appropriately found acclaim — and acclaim from the big festivals — Sundance, Tribeca, San Francisco International, Hong Kong Film Festival, Montreal Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and it won the First Place Award at the Black Maria Film Festival. Leighton Pierce’s Number One film won Number One film — verily apposite!

Number One represents Pierce as being an eclecticist — and an editor who paints with a soft bush — who blends a wide array of images plucked from nature. Abstractions are the result of frame deconstruction, experiments in frame size and shape, the re-assemblage of the frame, and the juxtaposing movements of on-screen action and hand-held POV camera movements.

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Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World (2000)

In the world of cinema, the early career of a filmmaker typically is that of the short film. During this momentous filmmaking period, the filmmaker normally produces 5, 10, sometimes 15 shorts films; the work of this period may bring success, failure, or a little of both, but these are trivial matters; the experimenting of this period is what takes precedence; the filmmaker logs invaluable time in experimentation, and in these experiments, the filmmaker starts to chase a certain aesthetic, a certain vision, certain motifs, and certain peculiarities; the filmmaker will continue to chase these ideas throughout his or her entire career, and this is the chase that will define the filmmaker’s career. In other words, short films are important.

In regards to the short film, Guy Maddin is a unique case — he often produces a handful of short-films between the release of his feature-length films; most directors say adiós to the short-film after they become a feature-length film director; however, a large chunk of Maddin’s prolific filmmaking career is composed of short films — Maddin’s short and feature-length films rarely differ in greatness.

Maddin, a renowned filmmaker from Canada, is best know for his feverish hyper-expressionist films, namely, My Winnipeg (2007), Careful (1992), The Heart of the World (2000), The Saddest Music in the World (2003), and Brand Upon the Brain! (2006). These are films that draw influence from — and pay homage to —  the surrealist films of the 1920s and ’30s and the German-expressionist films of the 1920s and ’30s, and Maddin often pay tribute to the silent film; sometimes Maddin films are black and white, some are a mix of black and write with dashes of color, and if his films do have sound, Maddin, to varying extents, pursues a low fidelity sound, i.e. that of the early talky films, the ’50s Fredrico Fellini film, and so forth.

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Samantha Morton in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002)

Indiewire, an active blog that follows independent film, invited a 100 or so film critics and bloggers to weigh in on the best movies of the decade.

The votes have been tallied; the films are organized by numbered rankings according to votes tallied. I’m quite pleased with the number one selection and it’s pleasant to find some unexpected films on this list. Anyone care to post their top five films of the decade? See below.

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2009 forever is forever marked by the US –> Global economic recession; 2009, in my opinion, also marks the overlooked recession of the Hollywood and the corporately-funded independent film. More than ever, films are uninspired, boring, and unoriginal. Seemingly, there is no end in sight for the comic book film, the sequel to the comic book film, the comic book film prequel, the comic book film trilogy, and, of course, the comic book film franchise, which stretches far and wide, deep and high. Think Twilight and its Burger King and flavor-blasted zesty hot Fritos merchandise. Think of the doody in your toilet.

Then we have the producers, writers, and directors that perpetuate their shameless romp of the Hollywood remake film; my pants were blown off when I first heard the news of the upcoming Red Dawn (2010) and Robocop (2011) remakes. Remaking Red Dawn (1984) is absolutely absurd — Red Dawn is an anti-communist film — let Red Dawn and its star Patrick Swayze rest in peace … eternally in the ’80s … where they belong.

Unfortunately, nothing is sacred in the eyes of the Hollywood producer, for if he had any sort of sentimental thought, he would lose money. Instead, he swaps the premise of the WWIII Russian invasion with a WWIII Chinese invasion.

Futhermore, Daron Aronofsky cannot remake Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987). Making a Robocop film without Peter Weller is a grand crime. Paul Verhoeven will always remain a better director the Aronosky. If anyone wants to argue this, be my guest.

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Jack Kentala’s Three Most-Favorite Films of 2009

2009, like most other years, saw me going to the theater probably less than a dozen times. Chalk it up to insane ticket prices, or obnoxious other-viewers, or the slimming release window between the theater and DVD, or my daily binge of a movie per day via Netflix, or, hell, I can be my usual curmudgeony self and say that it’s rare when ten good films come out in any given year. This fine online establishment has hosted my lukewarm reviews of Avatar and Where The Wild Things Are, to the downright-mauling of Inglorious Basterds and, to a lesser extent, Drag Me To Hell.

That said, I expect I’ll catch up on 2009 films early next year ‘round the Academy Awards, when most of these hit DVD. If nothing else, I expect good things from Up In The Air, if only because of director Jason Reitman (though I honestly don’t like Thank You For Smoking) and George Clooney. Considering that I just watched the 2000 film Tigerland, which criminally played in a scant five theaters, and now have placed next to Traffic as my favorite of the year, I figure I’ll run into some 2009 films that slipped through the cracks for the rest of my film-watching years.

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$230 million worth of pretty emptiness; or empty prettiness

written by Jack Kentala

I, like many others, already had an opinion about Avatar before I stepped into an IMAX theater and put on 3D glasses. I had an opinion about how I could spend $230 million. That, as a nonplussed, nonfan of Titantic, nor Aliens, nor the Terminator movies, I could make a hell of a better movie with $230 million than James Cameron. That as an independent filmmaker going broke making a film with an out-of-pocket budget of $15,000, I don’t have the risk of having so much money and marketing out of a product (as Avatar is certainly more product than film) and, thus, can actually tell a story where the morality isn’t black and white; where one set of people are eulogized while dying and the others are mercilessly slaughtered; where one feels a growing sense of fatigue at every shiny, pretty thing.

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Ten-sentence children’s book turned into a 101-minute film with varying degrees of success

written by Jack Kentala

Consider the polar ends of the spectrum: Where The Wild Things Are, mostly-beloved picture book by an ageset now in their 20s and 30s; a hipster-approved trailer accompanied by an unheard version of The Arcade Fire’s classic “Wake Up,” and an OST by hipster-approved Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; a film heavily advertised on adult-oriented outlets like Pitchfork and The AV Club; coming from solid director Spike Jonze and cinematographer Lance Acord; promised as “dark” despite a PG rating (which I give benefit-doubt to, since 2001: A Space Odyssey is rated goddamn G); in stark contrast to, at the 12:30 p.m. showing on opening day, myself being the only adult viewer without (multiple/loud) children. (more…)

A Sam Raimi film for people who really like Sam Raimi films

By Jack Kentala

Some would say I’m unqualified to “review” a Sam Raimi movie. I agree. After all, the only films of his I’ve seen are Spider-Man (decent), Spider-Man 2 (worse), and Spider-Man 3 (deliberately terrible). I have seen nothing of his horror films. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a contemporary non-M. Night Shyamalan supernatural/horror film. (more…)