Slipping Through Space

Here I am! 

Embrace the moment now while I am here, I have a feeling I may disappear again shortly.  It goes like this: I moved, I lived out of a suitcase for two weeks, I relocated, then sat--where I still remain now--in a temporary apartment in beautiful Ft. Greene, Brooklyn with a new iMac that has outsmarted me in the password department.  I'm locked out!

For the next few sentences or paragraphs I intend to ramble in a tone that is hopefully not too incoherent about the movies I've seen in the past month-and-a-half and the soul draining sadness I feel from the consistent lack of them in that time frame.  I am at the point where I'm writing post-it notes to myself, "Watch a movie!" lest I forget.  My eyes are lazy.  They're atrophied.  Do you know this feeling, when you're used to looking and watching, having that clanking bell of emotions reverberate inside yourself from seeing such things?  It's some life-validating source of curiosity that is suddenly pulled away from you, leaving your eyes to rest lazily upon the landscape with no newness. 

I haven't consistently seen in so long it is like a cataract dulling my line of sight.  The eyes dull to cinema when you don't watch.  You've got to keep up!  It's like practicing a sport.  If you live by consistency and dedication, your athletic prowess improves.  And so it is with the movies: the more you watch the more you see.

Alas!  I have been sleepwalking for weeks.


As my daily life begins to settle a few films have trickled in.  For instance, Paranormal Activity at the Brooklyn Pavilion last night.  I did a jig inside my head I was so giddy to be back at the theater, but then the movie started and I was unplugged from that amp.  How long would this alternating structure of daytime-nighttime documentation continue?  The sun rises and the feigned bickering of an impossibly wealthy 20-something couple fills the gritty video space with a weight as light as freshly sifted flour.  The night sets in--usually around 3:15 a.m., to be exact--and the creep show starts.  I'm a wimp who likes to be scared by spectacles like this, so my heart had a few starts (the footprints through the powder!  the door slam!), but in all, what a snooze. 


So, after my hiatus, I'll have to work my way up to better pictures.


Tonight I made it to the end of my old stand-by, My Man Godfrey (1936).  I keep a handful of DVDs unpacked in a stack of urgent belonging that I need at my ready.  There's my William Wordsworth anthology, the third edition of the American Heritage, a thesaurus, Marlene Dietrich's ABC, Singin' in the Rain, The Godfather, Clueless, and My Man.  Also, notebooks and pens.  In an apartment that's still decorated in brown corrugate, these are happy bits of equipage.  I put on My Man every other night or so for 15 or 20 minutes while I sit upright in a blue ladder-back chair eating my dinner from a large serving plate (new dishes have not been purchased yet), so it takes a while to get through a full movie.  Besides, I really only need a few minutes of comfortable distraction.


Tonight I finished it though, and decided again that Carole Lombard is my favorite actress of all-time, just behind Barbara Stanwyck.    My Man Godfrey is a perfect Hollywood narrative.  No surprises.  You know where the story is headed.  Carole Lombard plays an airhead we can love, and William Powell speaks with a cadence that makes you think the words are just dancing off his lips. 

 A day or two before I drove my moving van out of Chicago I caught Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are.  While I don't think it's a great film, for its jarring tantrum scenes that usually feel unprovoked, its overwhelming melancholy struck a true chord in me.  I haven't seen a children's movie that has ever been so eager to explore that emotion, unrelentingly.  The critical consensus marks that as a detriment to it, but I remember feeling a melancholy strangely similar to this as a kid that I could never articulate.  It was sweet.

Sweet dreams for tonight.  I hope to see Good Hair tomorrow!  Or maybe Capitalism: A Love Story.  Or Antichrist.  Or...

Lynch Socks it to the iPhone

I'm willing to pay a good ticket price to hear David Lynch lecture on the vices of movie-watching on the iPhone.  Until then...



...that about sums it up for me.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: Oh, O!

O is a cute letter.  A jubilant, silly one.  Not silly in the sense that it connotes frivolity or ignorance; but silly in its infinite, tubby rotundness that when pronounced makes its speaker sound awfully harmless and light.  I think if there is a letter that most describes my personality it would definitely be O, even if I prefer the letters P and K (in that order).  So I've got allegiance to my initials, who doesn't?

Back to O.  Maybe I like it so much because, as a vowel, it is so easily malleable to sound like any of its four other brethren vowels, like for example, the letter A in:

Oxygen (out of a tank)
Why wait till you are under a tent to breath it in?

But mostly, as described in previous notes on Ms. Dietrich's alphabet, O words sound outstandingly like themselves.  Like the most important O word of all!

Optimism
Have it.  There is always time to cry later.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Until I saw Jennifer's Body the only Megan Fox I knew was the scantily clad brunette who basked in the perfect bronze glow of Michael Bay's plasticky summer blockbusters, the Transformer series. To say she "basked" in his artificial light, though, is probably a misnomer; it's more apt to say she was simply on display, like a mannequin with changeable sexy facial expressions. Her character in Transformers is a cliche to say the least, a mass offense to feminism at worst. In either case, it's safe to say we did not get a fair opportunity to judge Ms. Fox as an actress so much as we did as a Forever 21 model.

When I heard of her role in the new teen horror movie, Jennifer's Body I figured this was redemption time. Poof, be gone, Mr. Bay! While she hit the big time in the director's toy robot movies that gave her wider visibility in a business that's dauntingly difficult to break into, it happened at the expense of becoming objectified as a "salty" piece of meat.

That is the screenwriter of Jennifer's Body, Diablo Cody's code for "hot."  Fox sat quietly in her savory marinade but rose, ironically, as a hungry maneater.  If there was ever a more clever and cunning response to the platitudes given her in Transformers, I can't fathom it: Jennifer (Megan Fox) tears boys limb from limb, savoring their flesh, ruthlessly.  So much for that beauteous bronze glow, it's more like a first-degree sunburn now.

More than a response to the silly incoherence of the role Michael Bay provided for Fox, however, Jennifer's Body is foremost a teen picture--a woman's picture even, and of course, a horror.  I like the sequence of those classifications, going from teen to woman to horror; swirl them all into one and you've got a dozen Lifetime movies--"We triumph because we're victims!" 

But Jennifer is kind of a victim.  She's got more than a fair share of daddy issues that leave her to the devices of a rather cruel gang of rockers from the city.  Visiting her hometown of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, the guys lure her effortlessly away from her dedicated best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), in, of all things, a van.  Not an up-to-date, modern mini-van; no, this is a full-on rapemobile, the kind from the kidnapping dramatizations in Unsolved Mysteries (coincidentally, that show ended its run with host Robert Stack in 2002 on the Lifetime network, go figure).

To parse through this line of thought though, as a teen film it works as a gory satire in its depiction of the impossible social pressures, emotional frailty, and physical uncertainty of being a teenager.  "Hell is a teenaged girl," says Needy in the film's opening line.  Jennifer's Body makes that a literal reality.

Directed by a woman (Karyn Katsuma) and written by a woman (Diablo Cody), this could also be classified as woman's picture.  Two females lead the movie as both primary protagonist (Needy) and antagonist (Jennifer).  The men are only minor characters, though ones that work as the only fuel for the girls' motivations.  While Jennifer seeks revenge by gobbling up the guts of her dates like they were Thanksgiving turkeys, Needy has a more reasoned approach.

After a lifetime of neglect from her bestie Jennifer, Needy is at her pal's side devotedly, sympathizing with her plight of prettiness and cruelty because that's simply the state of the status quo.  It's not until she comes to the mature realization that Jennifer keeps her around as a punching bag--she's the nerdy friend used and abused to build up her self-confidence--that their relationship dynamic takes a turn.

For those concerned with spoilers, stop here, but the fact that Needy pushes a stake through the heart of her vampire companion that brings us to the film's final bookend at her new residence at the psych ward, well, that too speaks to the tenuous nature of female friendships.  More specificially though, what does it mean that Needy, a perfectly normal teenaged girl with a healthy love life and aptitude for scholastics ends her high school tour at a mental institution?  That Jennifer, a pretty but utterly mean and insecure girl, is killed?

On the surface, there doesn't seem to be much hope anticipated or delineated in Jennifer's Body for young women.  They can definitely speak up for themselves, but that isn't a much improved-upon statistic from another female director's films, Amy Heckerling's 15-year-old teen pic Clueless from 1995, for example.

Of course, looking at it as a horror solely, Jennifer's Body takes on a alternate meaning.  Where young and adolescent women are dressed up in mini-skirts as meat for the killing in recent horrors (e.g. Saw), at least Jennifer's Body keeps the women at the helm, dressed for the most part, and packaged with a brain.

Still, Jennifer's defining characteristic, to me, comes back to its lead, Ms. Fox.  She's the star. And she speaks.  It may be in the tongue of Cody's clamoring colloquialisms ("Hey, Monistat." "What's up, Vagisil?"), but it's a big step away from Michael Bay's direction.  That isn't a bad thing.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: N

Oh, sleek and snappy dark nail polish that is so the in thing this season in fashion, I adore you.  You make my punky fashion spirit socially acceptable at the office, even as you chip away to that gnawed dot of color in the middle of my nail weeks after a painting.

Unfortunately, Ms. Dietrich does not agree.  Though, I choose to believe that were she alive today she'd be right on board with this progressive punk vibe.  Alas...

Nail Polish
Dark nail polish is vulgar.

Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story (2009)

Have you ever heard of Camp Ojibwa? I had not until this summer, when I saw director Louis Lapat’s documentary Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story (2009) that takes place at this oddly named summer camp for boys. Perusing Ojibwa's website I have learned that the camp has been around for decades, dating back to 1928 when its founding director set up shop in the North Woods of Wisconsin. I suspect it is quietly famous among the generations of boys who have attended its lakeshore locale, who Lapat says consists of mostly the affluent Jewish, a kind of Skull and Bones society for kids revved up for field hockey matches and mess hall banter rather in place of forged political ties and the carrying out of dirty tricks.

Boys ranging in age from seven to 16 leave their home cities for eight weeks to meet there, trading in their parents’ cul-de-sac playground for intense training and bonding sessions that culminate in the camp’s famous “Collegiate Week.” This is the final, defining event of the boys’ interim adventure that Lapat features in his film. The campers are divided into teams and assigned a coach who has named them after his favorite college team, hence “Collegiate Week.” All coaches are Ojibwa alums. When their team is down they specialize in shirtless rages of abdominal flexing, and yelling that sounds more like a baritone bark—that special kind of sports-related incoherence that 20-year-old guys are so good at inflecting. You may have just felt a testosterone rush.

Lapat tempers that testosterone buzz by inserting himself in the narrative—as an animated punk rocker in stick figure form—that lends a touch of sentimentality amidst the Collegiate Week’s fierce competitiveness. He was a four-time Ojibwa camper that shared a common lack of athletic ability with the greater majority of his campmates: Ojibwa is a place for the scrawnier boys at school to live out the athletic dreams that they can never reach in reality. Though, there are still a few fellas peppered into the mix with enough ambition and ability to make you squirm at the far end of the dodgeball court like a scared dog. One of those kids is 10-year-old Jeremy Nachbar who pep talks his teammates with fluent vigor, and if we can bump this kid’s verbal score on the SAT, he will already be ready for professional coaching. He only needs a little more diversity in his vocabulary.





Judging by Jeremy’s coach, Andrew Robinson, the famously competitive ladies’ man and party


animal, who answers to the macho diminutive name “Arob” (think how perfect this name sounds bellowed through the air of a college house party), you can see where Jeremy gets his inspiration. But then there is coach Adam Korn with a soft belly and a kinder heart. An Ojibwa alumni of a different sort, Adam was probably the kid who was picked last for the team and starved for peer approval during his formative years at camp, and if there is any criticism of this well put together first feature from Lapat, served in a neat 58 minutes, it would be the dimmer spotlight that is placed on him. While the film explores a number of different characters in its course, Arob emerges as the movie’s clear star.

So I asked myself as I watched Win or Lose, is the lean cut and fast-talking Arob really the guy I want to be rooting for? Is he my hero, or is it Adam, or even better, is it the disaffected and wonderfully sarcastic 13-year-old Joel Lapin who thinks Collegiate Week is a joke and would prefer to drop competition and watch daytime TV? I can’t help but sympathize with the nerdy and naturally witty; Joel stole my heart, and I suspect he stole Lapat’s too. It is he, after all, who plays himself in a retrospective of animated vignettes that illustrate his own awkward adolescence and gothic fashion sense, but never bitterly. Like him, I was content on the sidelines watching Joel and Jeremy, and Arob and Adam play, because abstractly, those portraits led inevitably to flashes of my own adolescent and young adult memories (all of the humiliations and exhilarations at once), and I felt at peace knowing they were behind me. Tomorrow morning I’ll face a corporate gunslinger shooting down my cubicle. Maybe then I’ll think of Ojibwa. For tomorrow’s distress will soon be a mere flicker in the memories of yore.

Director Louis Lapat’s Win or Lose: A Summer Camp Story has aired in the Midwest on PBS, and will continue to screen nationwide on PBS in the coming months. It has screened at the Wisconsin, Minneapolis, and Sausalito Film Festivals, and will play at the Denver International Film Festival this November. It is also the winner of the Student Academy Awards in New York. Contact your PBS station for airdates.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: M

It's after midnight as I write this and the Monday morning workday is a scant few hours away. It's fitting, then, that Marlene tell us a little something about...

Melancholy
Having the blues, or Weltschmerz. Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.


That sentiment speaks to something else I miss on Sunday nights: Mad Men. Having finished the first season and jonesing now for the second, while I long for a cable subscription to watch the third, I thought of Draper and company as I read what Marlene had to say about the...


Martini
I am deeply suspicious of men who carry martinis to the lunch or dinner table.

Such savvy intuition!

Ponyo (2009)

Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo was one of the two great movies I caught over the holiday weekend. The other is hardly as hug-able as Ponyo--Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, a miracle of politically incorrect humor (maybe more on it later)--but Ponyo could have kept me bubbling over happily on its own. A little goldfish longing to be a girl sneaks to the surface where her fateful friend Sosuke scoops her up in a pail. They're instant BFFs. And after licking a cut clean on Sosuke's finger, Ponyo the fish turns into the girl you see in the above still, running across waves of water to be with her friend. She's not just weightless on water, either; she's a total free spirit with almost no learned associations of daily human life: a towel, a bowl of soup, a lick of honey from a teaspoon is as wondrous to Ponyo as her skipping across waves is to us.

As usual, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn animation is stellar, lively, and a fine dedication to an art form that is now overshadowed by computer animation. Comparing the virtues of hand-drawn vs. computer animation is a little bit of apples and oranges, but there is something to be said for the signature oozy forms Miyazaki is so great at creating. Visually, his Howl's Moving Castle (2004) is one cloud form melting seamlessly into another, and when I think of his Spirited Away (2001), it's the animated goop that spreads like a molasses trail off spooky characters from the underworld that I see; it's a look I would not immediately associate with animation that's not CGI. After all, with the advent of computer animation cartoons became increasingly aerodynamic. He-Man looks like he was modeled after Zac Efron more than he was a boxy pro wrestler, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have definitely had some work done. Add the bulbous Pixar figures to the mix and cartoons of late look downright bubbly. That's altogether fine by me, but it's not an aesthetic I'd assign to the rawness that hand-drawn images inherit. And yet, there is Miyazaki.

The theater was packed with kids. I haven't seen a movie with that many munchkins in ages and it added another dimension to the experience. So that's my recommendation: don't just see Ponyo in theaters, see it in an afternoon screening with a horde of squirmy, runny-nosed kids. The clouds will lift.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: L

We are almost half-way through the alphabet with today's entry brought to you by the letter L. L is a particularly fond letter, I think; a letter that sounds like it is, that produces words that sound so appealingly like they are. Examples: Lilt, lover, light, lace, languor, lattice, leafy, and loathe. This is not a wordsmith site devoted to the love of language (more L words!), however, so I shall pause here with the list (ANOTHER L word).

To stay up with current politics, here is Marlene's definition of author Harper Lee, whose "To Kill a Mockingbird" is discussed this week in The New Yorker regarding some history on Southern liberalism. A good read from Malcolm Gladwell, if anyone is interested in some straying ideas from cinema. But, finally, the reason you came here, Marlene's definition:

Lee, Harper
To Kill a Mockingbird shook me up for a long time. I often think of the children as if they were real. I think of Atticus with the affection one has for the memory of someone one might have married had one known him then.

Sweet of her to send that little love letter to Atticus:

Letters (of Love)
Write them. Otherwise no one will know what wonderful feelings fill you. Even if the king or queen of your heart is unworthy (as you might have been told), write them--it will do you good. Keep copies.

Beaches of Agnes (2009)

When it comes to movies as affecting as Agnes Varda's Beaches of Agnes (2009) my critical faculties fail me, I become inept, and unfit for the job of writing about film. But if my objective is to delineate the composition of this movie and its narrative construction, I am in luck, complete and utter luck, because Beaches is a film unconcerned with maintaining narrative structure, with trying to prove a clear political point. Beaches is about love and life, simply; beautiful remembrances of the fleeting, the intangible, it is an all-encompassing vision of everything that is wonderful and fearful in life--death and sorrow, liberty and glee.

I arrived home in such a state that time itself ceased to matter. This was a late Sunday night screening, mind you. The work day awaits me in a mere matter of hours, but armed with such optimism as the widowed octoguenarian's in the film tonight, I opted out of the sleazy #22 bus ride home for a walk instead. At home I found a late dinner and a glass of cool wine. The balmy Chicago breeze wafts in through my window, here, at my side, and I adore its caress against my skin between a thin cotton tee. What could ever dissuade one from such simple pleasures after the priviness to an aged and wrought woman's optimism amidst her mournful travails--who yet seeks happy refuge in a fort fashioned as the belly of a whale, colorful swaths of fuschia and turquoise surround her there--of her own husband's death? What audacity could one have to arrive home in a foul mood after watching the eighty-something Agnes Varda tiptoe backwards through a faux beach scene smack in the middle of the Paris streets?

I am talking now to those who have seen the movie. Do you want me to set it up? Do you want a plot synopsis sans spoilers? I'm afraid I can't do it. Head elsewhere if you want that. Today, this is a moment of communal joy. And even if you have not seen The Beaches of Agnes, that's okay too. We can still extol today's seeings together, for, as Agnes says, "While I live, I remember," and you also, even having not seen the film, are alive with your own remembrances. Let us embrace them together. You can later be elucidated by dear Agnes's lightness of being.

Varda's is my favorite kind of film. It's the sort that ponders the pear shaped garden her mother used to keep at her childhood home. It focuses a kid-like gaze upon the world to witness a series of trapeze artists perform on the sandy beach. Agnes lines up next to them in a presentational shot as if to say that in spirit, she is as youthful and buoyant as they. She tells us, "The whole idea of fragmentation appeals to me," as we witness a collage of still, some out-of-focus, images from her days as a photographer; the foreground is blurry while the figures in the background are in focus, flaws, she says, of her early photographic technique that in time she has grown to appreciate. The pursuit of perfection is impossible to achieve in youth.

She leads us further into her life's course. Her friendships with directors Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, with her late husband, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), for whom the film becomes a dedicated eulogy and passionate expression--her past and memories are inextricably tied to him; she brings him to life through the retelling of their shared stories--and with Chris Marker, seen here through only the facade of his animated cat, he asks her a robotic series of junket questions, "Are you a film buff?" Interspersed are retellings of her time in Nazi occupied Paris when she and her family lived on rations and wore wooden shoes. Strewning fistfuls of hot pink begonias and roses upon her husband's grave, she makes public for the first time very blantantly, his failing battle with AIDS.

She turns on a dime and we see her at the Venice Biennale wearing a potato costume. In an earlier scene she meets the residents of her former home, the husband a toy train collector, a self-proclaimed "trainopath." For every tear that is shed in Agnes's life story there are equal or greater exuberances. She picks through the wares at flea markets, in one scene finding a collector's plate for the Dardennes brothers, another two filmmakers in her circle, that makes this movie as much autobiography as it is an ode to cinema itself. "What is cinema?" she asks. What is so unique about this medium that she is able to jump through time to tell alternatingly fantastic and terrifying stories in one present period? The camera tracks past myriad film awards both she and Demy have won, the Palme d'or, the Golden Lion; she says at the film's finale, "Cinema is my home," and never have we as an audience been so casually in conversation with the filmmaker herself about the one thing we all know intimately well, life.