The first two minutes of Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void:
Hype Williams' "All of the Lights" music video:
I love the idea that Hype and Kanye went to an independent movie theater to watch Enter the Void together and came out with the idea for their font orgy music video (did they perhaps share a bag of Sour Patch Kids?). I find it a much better piece of work than Kanye's more celebrated "Runaway" "film" (for which Mr. Williams served as a "writer") but that's probably just my prejudice against the depiction of white slaves. It's amusing to consider that Mr. Williams is perhaps even more adventurous than Noe with the overlay and movement of his titles.
As shown by the YouTube comments for the Enter the Void sequence, there's considerable cross-pollination between Kanye and Noe fans here, which I find artistically encouraging (as we must always try to move into aesthetic concerns beyond Rihanna's own inspired pairing).
14 March 2011
Anxiety and The Adjustment Bureau
I attacked Inception because the dreams that comprise the film were directed by Michael Bay, not by you or me. I laughed again at Hollywood's inability to capture nightmares. So I was shocked into real anxiety by how closely the events in George Nolfi's The Adjustment Bureau match the twists of my own recurring dreams.
Without getting too far into the film's deeply silly plot, suffice to say: senatorial candidate David Norris (Matt Damon, still running all over the place but in less comfortable shoes than he wears in the Bourne franchise) wants to be with Elise (Emily Blunt) but is thwarted at every turn by fedora'd "angels" (for lack of a better word) who insist that she is not part of his preordained life plan.
In The Adjustment Bureau and my dream, you're trying to find someone. You're late. You're lost. You start running. Dangerous obstacles get in your way (cars crash violently on a street you're about to cross, the floor falls away and there's a vertiginous drop right in front of you). You go through doors, find you're in the wrong place, go back out the door and find yourself in a third location, also wrong. You're panting, frantic, hopeless. Naturally, things work out better for David in the film than for me in my dream, perhaps because my sense of direction is so bad (and I'm never wearing a magical hat that gives me superpowers).
David eventually gets a little help from the angels, and this is the rub with The Adjustment Bureau. He learns, for instance, that the angels can't read his thoughts when it's rainy (David Denby joked that the protagonists should have just moved to Seattle (the joke is especially apt now, in March, the wrist-slittingest month of all, weather-wise)). Anthony Mackie (as Harry) and John Slattery (as Richardson) give cool enough performances but their constant presence necessitates too many laughable lines of shouted, angel-related dialogue: "You've hit your ripple limit!" or "Anyone in a hat is a threat!" Plus the library where all the angels hang out is not as architecturally appealing as the one in Wings of Desire. The angelic exception is Thompson, played Terence Stamp (check his A-MA-ZING scarf with complementary patterns on either side) who flexes real power and menace.
I know that for big studio producers Philip K. Dick stories=good movies but I would have moved this film in a different direction (and, from what I've read, the Dick story "Adjustment Team" differs substantially from the movie version). The narrative tension suffers because we know in the first 15 minutes that David is fighting against a huge conspiracy and will do so for the rest of the film. I would have allowed room for the idea that the angels are just part of David's paranoid personality, part of the larger understanding many people have that our whole lives are being controlled by a shadowy god and/or government.
I'd also like to see Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in another film, perhaps one in which they aren't being harassed by malevolent angels the whole time. There's too many Damon and dude conversations and not enough Damon and Blunt--unlike 95% of Hollywood films this millennium, these two romantic leads actually seem like they want to have sex with each other. And that's why The Adjustment Bureau is worthy of netflixing.
Without getting too far into the film's deeply silly plot, suffice to say: senatorial candidate David Norris (Matt Damon, still running all over the place but in less comfortable shoes than he wears in the Bourne franchise) wants to be with Elise (Emily Blunt) but is thwarted at every turn by fedora'd "angels" (for lack of a better word) who insist that she is not part of his preordained life plan.
In The Adjustment Bureau and my dream, you're trying to find someone. You're late. You're lost. You start running. Dangerous obstacles get in your way (cars crash violently on a street you're about to cross, the floor falls away and there's a vertiginous drop right in front of you). You go through doors, find you're in the wrong place, go back out the door and find yourself in a third location, also wrong. You're panting, frantic, hopeless. Naturally, things work out better for David in the film than for me in my dream, perhaps because my sense of direction is so bad (and I'm never wearing a magical hat that gives me superpowers).
David eventually gets a little help from the angels, and this is the rub with The Adjustment Bureau. He learns, for instance, that the angels can't read his thoughts when it's rainy (David Denby joked that the protagonists should have just moved to Seattle (the joke is especially apt now, in March, the wrist-slittingest month of all, weather-wise)). Anthony Mackie (as Harry) and John Slattery (as Richardson) give cool enough performances but their constant presence necessitates too many laughable lines of shouted, angel-related dialogue: "You've hit your ripple limit!" or "Anyone in a hat is a threat!" Plus the library where all the angels hang out is not as architecturally appealing as the one in Wings of Desire. The angelic exception is Thompson, played Terence Stamp (check his A-MA-ZING scarf with complementary patterns on either side) who flexes real power and menace.
I know that for big studio producers Philip K. Dick stories=good movies but I would have moved this film in a different direction (and, from what I've read, the Dick story "Adjustment Team" differs substantially from the movie version). The narrative tension suffers because we know in the first 15 minutes that David is fighting against a huge conspiracy and will do so for the rest of the film. I would have allowed room for the idea that the angels are just part of David's paranoid personality, part of the larger understanding many people have that our whole lives are being controlled by a shadowy god and/or government.
I'd also like to see Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in another film, perhaps one in which they aren't being harassed by malevolent angels the whole time. There's too many Damon and dude conversations and not enough Damon and Blunt--unlike 95% of Hollywood films this millennium, these two romantic leads actually seem like they want to have sex with each other. And that's why The Adjustment Bureau is worthy of netflixing.
11 March 2011
In Love for the Mood of In the Mood for Love (or Something)
I'd recommend Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love anywhere, any time, from iPhones to plasma TVs meters across but, after seeing it in theater last week, I recommend it most of all on film stock. In cinema I prefer the love in my comedies to be requited and love in my dramas to be unrequited. ITMFL, with the so-quiet-it's-almost-nonexistent courtship between Chow (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung), falls in the second category.
Another way to summarize the film, from my other great discovery of the week: movie barcodes.
That white stripe in the middle is a fade out we see after an image that captures the incredible layering and precision of WKW's art. In this viewing, I noticed for the first time the complexity of the shot where Maggie Cheung centers the frame in her least densely patterned dress of the film: a daffodil print. She stands looking out a window fringed with foliage, next to floral curtains and in front of a sofa emblazoned with leaves. On her glass: more painted flowers. Floating at the bottom of her beverage: tea leaves. WKW's vision is total--he's left nothing out.
I paired my viewing of the film with Ming Wong's "In Love for the Mood" video installation at the Frye Museum. I can't pretend to unravel all the levels of meta- at work but to take a stab: Ming's piece is a multi-language, single gender reenactment by a white actress of a scene from ITMFL in which Chow and Su Li-zhen are not being themselves but are instead pretending to play the roles of their own unfaithful spouses. Postmodern confusion aside, it was fascinating to be in a room with the installation looping on three flatscreens with languages echoing around from surround sound speakers.
In more ways than the title, Ming's video loops seem an inversion of WKW's film. Rather like Godard's hidden earpiece technique with Anna Karina, Ming gives the actress her lines as she's speaking and her phonetic pronunciations are full of mistakes. Whereas Su Li-zhen breaks off speaking because of emotional devastation, the actress in the Ming's piece breaks off and giggles because she doesn't speak Cantonese. Despite precisely recreating the visuals of a scene from In the Mood for Love, "In Love for the Mood" feels offhand, less serious. WKW is notorious for the number of takes he requires, demanding that his actors' voices match an exact cadence he has in mind. Perhaps Ming's "first rehearsal" art reveals some of the sweat that's required to make WKW's frictionless celluloid machines.
Another way to summarize the film, from my other great discovery of the week: movie barcodes.
That white stripe in the middle is a fade out we see after an image that captures the incredible layering and precision of WKW's art. In this viewing, I noticed for the first time the complexity of the shot where Maggie Cheung centers the frame in her least densely patterned dress of the film: a daffodil print. She stands looking out a window fringed with foliage, next to floral curtains and in front of a sofa emblazoned with leaves. On her glass: more painted flowers. Floating at the bottom of her beverage: tea leaves. WKW's vision is total--he's left nothing out.
I paired my viewing of the film with Ming Wong's "In Love for the Mood" video installation at the Frye Museum. I can't pretend to unravel all the levels of meta- at work but to take a stab: Ming's piece is a multi-language, single gender reenactment by a white actress of a scene from ITMFL in which Chow and Su Li-zhen are not being themselves but are instead pretending to play the roles of their own unfaithful spouses. Postmodern confusion aside, it was fascinating to be in a room with the installation looping on three flatscreens with languages echoing around from surround sound speakers.
In more ways than the title, Ming's video loops seem an inversion of WKW's film. Rather like Godard's hidden earpiece technique with Anna Karina, Ming gives the actress her lines as she's speaking and her phonetic pronunciations are full of mistakes. Whereas Su Li-zhen breaks off speaking because of emotional devastation, the actress in the Ming's piece breaks off and giggles because she doesn't speak Cantonese. Despite precisely recreating the visuals of a scene from In the Mood for Love, "In Love for the Mood" feels offhand, less serious. WKW is notorious for the number of takes he requires, demanding that his actors' voices match an exact cadence he has in mind. Perhaps Ming's "first rehearsal" art reveals some of the sweat that's required to make WKW's frictionless celluloid machines.
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