Jodie Mack viewing notes

Two Hundred Feet (2004)

I first heard of Jodie Mack in 2014 when Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project (2013) was making the festival rounds and generating a positive buzz on social media. I've yet to see that one, but last year I had the opportunity to see Wasteland no.1: Ardent Verdant (2017) and it was one of my favorites of 2017.

I hadn't realized that many of her earlier works are available for free on her website and her Vimeo page. What follows are some viewing notes on fifteen of her films that I watched while sitting in my hotel room in New London, Connecticut.

There is an exquisite pleasure in watching Mack's form and technique evolve over the course of these early shorts and experiments. Two-Hundred Feet (2003) plays like a Brakhage film if Brakhage were fun and bright. Her work with shapes and even scenarios emerging from a primordial slop of abstraction increases in its complexity from film to film. At other times, her early works recalls for me Pat O'Neill in the way they established patterns of shapes and movement that will increase steadily in their complexity as the film goes on. The sheer joy of creation on display makes each film a treat, even the ones that feel more like arts and crafts projects.

Posthaste Perennial Pattern

Of these works, the best are those that establish clear visible parameters in the material that they are working with. Rad Plaid (2010), Posthaste Perennial Pattern (2010), and Unsubscribe #1: Special Offer Inside (2010) all indicate a finite body of raw materials that the films then abstract through perspective, repetition, and montage, which function to create movement in what is essentially still photography. My favorite of these (and of everything I watched here) is Posthaste Perennial Pattern, which juxtaposes artificial nature, handmade floral patterns on furniture, with raw audio of an outdoor spring scenario: bird song and passing cars in the distance. It's abstraction is grounded in a diagetic personal experience. While all of Mack's films are reflections of her daily life in some manner, Posthaste Perennial Pattern exhibits this without description or artists statement and contains a depth (perhaps through the audio) that moves it away from a fun catalog of shapes.

Unsubscribe no.2: All Eyes on the Silver Screen 

I was also taken by the entire Unsubscribe series, which reveals Mack at her most confident and experimental of the works I viewed. #1: Special Offer Inside makes a sub-atomic universe from junk mail envelopes (it recalled a much later/lesser film that I watched last year, Where You Go, There We Are (2017) by Jesse McLean). Unsubscribe no.2: All Eyes on the Silver Screen (2010) utilizes a stunning use of split screen images composed through practical collage effects. Something about its color and old movie fascination reminded me of Peter Tscherkassky's great Coming Attractions (2010). Unsubscribe #3: Glitch Envy (2010) continues this work of manifesting digital new media representation through analogue materiality, creating glitches through collage art and guttural human sound effects. The fourth in the series, Unsubscribe No. 4: The Saddest Song in the World (2010) is more in tuned to her musical/music video type work and recalls the queer zine girl group fascinations of Sadie Benning's bedroom films. I hope these references do not diminish Mack's stature, I offer them only as my own means of navigating her versatile style.

Yard Work is Hard Work

As of this posting I feel I need to give Lilly (2007) another spin. It was intriguing, but this and Yard Work is Hard Work (2008) were the least interesting of the films I watched. Both were created between the early proto-Brakhage experiments and the absolute mastery of her 2010 output. Something about the use of narrative doesn't quite land. Yard Work is Hard Work is perhaps the only one of these fifteen works that I didn't care for at all. It's twenty-seven minute running time didn't help (compared to three and six minute shorts), but it was shaped by my dislike of the typical Broadway musical style. The collage work is impressive, as always, but I found the overall effect to be grating and basic.

I also watched A Joy (2005), All Stars (2006), Mannequis Harlequin (2006), Harlequin (2006/9), Screensaver (2009), and Twilight Spirit (2009).

2010 Project Top 10 and Reflections

project index (here).

Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)

La belle endormie (Catherine Breillat)

O Estranho Caso de Angélica (Manoel de Oliveira)

The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone)

Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)

The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

Haishan Chuanqi (Jia Zhangke)

Hereafter (Clint Eastwood)

The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah)

Resident Evil: Afterlife (Paul W.S. Anderson)

This was supposed to be a reflection, but all I got is this confessional.

My first intention was to reflect on the cinema of 2010; to sketch out some observations and maybe even determine if it was a good year. I lost interest in that pretty quickly. Think piece ruminations on a year tend to be facile. A year is a year is a year. 2010 saw the release of at least thirty incredible films by my count. As far as observing patterns go, 2010 felt like a cinematic reset button. A dreamlike quality runs through my selections, making the year itself feel like a rekindling of flickering silent images and the playfulness of discarded studio fabrication. Artifice in the name poetry and a big fuck you to gritty realism. My kind of stuff.

My second intention was to remark on the process of this project, which started as a humble means of catching up on the major films of the new decade. I saw some great stuff. But all I've got to say about this project is that not only is a year in film an arbitrary parameter that breaks down almost constantly, there are always too many films to be seen. I wanted to cross boundaries and transcend film culture's fixation on the feature-length narrative, but all I managed to do was reify it. I didn't watch nearly enough experimental films or porn, and what I did watch didn't move me in the same way as the ten features above did. Here's an observation: maybe 2010 was a bad year for porn.

My biggest realization is that my criticism of most critic's top tens is misguided and stupid. I've always sneered at what I saw as the conservative homogeneity in so many year-end lists. Surely there is more diversity out there than the same rotation of fifteen over-represented films. There have always been those alternative critics that I idolize, the counter-cultural voices that are more dedicated to making idiosyncratic and personal lists rather than the consensus-driven concerns with what will stand the test of time. But what I found was that I should go easy on those hard working folks. There are simply too many films. I really don't know why I got so upset about all that. I've only ever been to one film festival twice and I can't imagine trying to see most films let alone having to report back on them all. Besides, a conservative and homogeneous top ten can still be deeply personal. I learned that when I realized how good The Social Network actually was. I was more afraid of being associated with the idea of a Fincher devotee than being honest with myself.

Anyway, here's what I really want to talk about and this might be navel-gazing but I like the challenge of making it more general beyond myself.

I find the formation of a top ten list to be excruciating and violent. However, every time I try and remove myself from the practice I fall right back into it. I'm trying to stop using the star ratings on Letterboxd, but even that's proving difficult. I am absolutely a product of the algorithm, the aggregate, the discipline of logging and ranking and listing. But at the same time I've become a victim of an obsessive revisionism. I can never seem to land on an order for ten films, which is why my list is alphabetical.

I guess because I see so many people produce these lists all the time that it must come easy, but that is a big assumption to make. I'd like to lean back on a polemic, like Mark Peranson in every editor's note of Cinema Scope, but the fact is I cannot complete the simplest task of listing ten favorite films in the order that I admire them. Part of this problem stems from issues that I'm dealing with for the first time: I've begun seeing a mental health specialist who thinks my inability to complete projects and not judge my own thoughts is an undiagnosed case of ADD that has caused depression. But we're not there yet and the reason I mention this in a film blog is because I desire to sort out my thoughts and positions on the method and theory of list making, of ranking, of the evaluation of films.

Anyway, the reason I lay this all out there is that the main thing I've taken from this 2010 Year in Film Project is a realization that rankings and lists are not my style. I desire to transform my feelings on the matter into a more focused method, maybe even a polemic. I'm hesitant to openly reject them, as we all must dance with them sooner or later (plus they are actually very handy when you find a person whose tastes matter to you). Also, we all get tired of that guy constantly swearing off facebook or smartphones or anything even vaguely contemporary. We get it, you're different. But with this project I'm finding that the alternative is difficult and time consuming: if we don't use stars or rankings then we have to write out our thoughts and feelings for everything. I want to do this, but that's a lot of work and I'm not convinced it's always worth it. I'm not really sure what is at stake here except maybe a political rejection of the enlightenment obsession with data and classification in favor of a more poetic? spiritual? humanistic? approach to cinema. We'll see how that works out.

anyway, here's ten more favorites from 2010:

Ang Ninanais (John Torres)

Coming Attractions (Peter Tscherkassky)

The Fighter (David O Russell)

The Owls (Cheryl Dunye)

Predators (Nimród Antal)

The Social Network (David Fincher)

Somewhere (Sophia Coppola)

Step Up 3D (Jon M Chu)

Unstoppable (Tony Scott)

The Ward (John Carpenter)

2010 film diary part IV

After taking too long to get the last update posted this one seemed to fall into place in a matter of days. Funny how that works. The speed with which I blasted through these titles coupled with the mixed impressions of each film made for a rather strange installment. The theme for this diary entry are films that are "profoundly OK," to paraphrase a rhetoric professor of mine. That is, nothing here really stands out.

Links: Letterboxd ranked list, Intro, Part I, Part II, Part III.

As always, from favorite to least favorite.

Insidious (James Wan)

Wan is frustrating for the very reason that so many of his films are almost-masterpieces. Insidious is among these efforts (I've yet to see Insidious Chapter 2). To begin with what works, Wan has a keen eye for establishing spaces. How he choreographs the movements of his camera and performers through these locations is absolutely poetic. The house in Insidious (like the one in The Conjuring) feels expansive like an entire universe resides in this one staged location in a way that is not unlike Fulci. Building on this sense of space is a seemingly effortless establishment of atmosphere, one of dread and an air pregnant with ghostly presence (apart from when his over-usage of hammy music spoils this). Wan manages a naturalism from his performers that makes Insidious compelling on a humanist level. But its as if he's working overtime to undermine everything that is great in his work. Insidious is overly invested in cheap jump-out scares that quickly become so predictable you can set your watch by them. But not only are they lazy, they shatter the moods he builds through his style. Likewise, his fondness for cliche horror elements is almost unbearable here. Once the ghosts start appearing more regularly and living characters cross over into 'The Further,' the film trades evocative mystery and dread for third-rate pressings of Jacob's Ladder and Silent Hill effects by way of Steve Beck. Wan stops showing us why something is creepy and assumes a familiarity with old timey dolls and demons will do the heavy lifting. At least The Conjuring has a solid first half before descending into schlock, this one only lasts about 20 minutes with intermittent moments of brilliance.

Im Shatten aka In the Shadows (Thomas Arslan)

My first and only Arslan film to date. Im Shatten is a solid crime film in that it feels flawless in its execution. Imagine if Drive was directed by a sophisticated filmmaker. Absolutely perfect in tone, pace, and composition. There are no wasted frames, even as the (short) film gives itself breathing room and takes its time in places. It occupies a place between dull arthouse deconstructions of crime and more guiltless procedural pleasures, being neither amoral or cynical in its posture. For all its still life formalism and proximity to being one of those films that just shows people staring at things (to quote my partner), it remains a film about faces and tones infused with a palpable human element. Each character is always sizing up the others and relationships are inferred from how comfortable or constrained a character's speech and expressions are. Ultimately, this is pared down character study situated within the neon chic of a daylight neo-noir. When all is said and done Im Shatten raises the question of whether being too sleek and spotless can render a film forgettable. While this is easily the best film of this post I find myself mostly ambivalent to it. I really liked watching it. Maybe I'll watch again.

Salt (Philip Noyce)

Salt suffers from a distracting personality crisis. Its CIA Cold War plot is more Luc Besson then John Le Carré, yet Noyce directs this like an early 2000s Fox Network television thriller; blocky and humorless. There's not enough plot or sophistication to warrant the restrained techniques and the outrageousness of the invincible Jolie demands a more frenetic, visceral approach. Imagine this shot like John Wick or Lucy and you'd have a bonafide action film. But Salt plays it close to the vest, often making its constant chase sequences rather boring and its empty dialogue and exposition unbearable at times due to its utter lack of nuance. Still, there are some inspired casting choices here: Chiwetel Ejiofor does his best and turns out some of the films most captivating scenes (like the finale in the helicopter) and August Diehl provides a much needed naturalism to his role as the normal husband, effectively providing the only human element to the film. And surprisingly, the exposition-y flashbacks with Diehl are often more interesting than the action itself. Jolie often seems out of place here as her histrionics are too award seasony for this material and her slo-mo sexy Kubrick stare (which amounts to a third of the film) is too goofy for most of the action. It feels like a tech rehearsal and not a performance.

The Other Guys (Adam McKay)

For the record I think McKay is a shit director, but some of his films (like this one) come highly recommended by cinephiles whose tastes I respect. I never understood the love for Anchorman (admitting that I need to rewatch it) for the same reasons I never understood the affection for most of his work. His films are sloppy, focusing too much on worthless plots that need to be either jettisoned or meticulously restructured to be more engaging. He favors shoehorning in choppy gags, cheap references, and overzealous performers who need to be reined in. This style of letting accomplished comedians ad-lib and improv everything is one that really grates me when there is no vision or structure to tie it together. It can work well, and often does for things like the work of Jody Hill or the myriad Trailer Park Boys titles. If at least the individual moments where more captivating, I wouldn't mind a disjointed film, but McKay traffics in constantly over-the-top forcefulness that always feels like everyone is trying way too hard with nothing to fall back on. Like McKay's other films, The Other Guys is loaded with brilliant talents, but only occasional (seemingly accidental) moments of brilliance. While this style is admirable and cinematically daring, it simply falls flat too much for me to be able to give it any credence. I will say that I love Talladega Nights, which is for me the best embodiment of Will Ferrell's trademark character, and Step Brothers works because of the well structured chemistry between Ferrell and Riley. But The Other Guys along with Anchorman 2 are simply the worst things I've seen on this level.

Han jia aka Winter Vacation (Li Hongqi)

Another crushing disappointment from a film that's been on my radar since its buzzing festival circuit. But now that I think about it, nowhere have I read someone articulate what about Hongqi's third film is especially great. I've read a lot of descriptors: Brechtian, deadpan, surrealist, meticulously composed, highly stylized (not to mention copious descriptions of Hongqi's importance as a poet and writer). And while all of these are accurate they merely describe the style and don't in and of themselves point toward any kind of quality. Han jia was for me a stylistically and intellectually dull film. It's brand of philosophical pessimism, no matter how Kafkaesque one thinks of it, is grating in a way that makes one ask the most philistine of questions: what's the point? It takes its time to make relatively banal observations; another film predicated upon the belief that pretentiously illustrating hypocrisy is some how enlightening or daring. Perhaps it is due to my inability to speak the language (and this really does matter), but the humor was more flat and needlessly prolonged, not deadpan. Moments were funny in ways akin to Roy Andersson's work, but it was mostly fleeting glimpses of Hongqi's satirical wit. I usually dig this kind of compositional pretension (being a great admirer of both Andersson and Peter Greenaway), but this feels like installation video art masquerading as a film, with none of the sense of space and temporality that makes great installation work so captivating (Tsai Ming-liang this is not). And this reaction of mine speaks more to my tastes: I don't care how meticulously crafted a shot is, a film predicated entirely upon sophisticated compositions are worthless to me.

2010 film diary part III

I've been dragging my feet on this installment. Blame it on grad school. I've also gotten sidetracked by catching up on Oscar noms. As much as I loathe the Oscars, I still feel the need to see as many as possible. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity (is it just me, or are the majority of noms especially shitty this year?). I've also taken a detour through the films of Tsui Hark, of which I'm not sorry.

For those following along, here is the work-in-progress ranked list on Letterboxd, the intro to this project here, part I here, and part II here.

Again, these are ranked favorite to least favorite.

Hereafter (Clint Eastwood)

I want to gush about this masterpiece. It might be my favorite of the year, but I need to revisit my other top favorites to be sure (namely Film socialisme, Attenberg, and The Strange Case of Angelica). There are two elements that stand out to me. First, Eastwood constructs a very physical experience. The film has weight and is grounded in the immediacy of each moment. This is most apparent in the tsunami sequence, which alone is a masterclass in directing. This creates an interesting balance for the film's weightless subject of an afterlife. Even the idea that lived existence is transient, the curiosity of what happens after death remains a question asked from a corporeal standpoint. Second, the film is about chance, fate, serendipity, and perhaps even the notion that everything happens for reason (all shit I don't believe but love seeing on screen). Yet this isn't a film about events in the sense that two or three characters crossing paths is somehow more important than the process or experience of getting to those meetings. Every moment is open, takes its time, and gives one space to wander. A key example is Matt Damon's relationship with his cooking class partner. (Spoiler) They don't wind up together, but her presence is crucial to the film's exploration of ideas. Eastwood doesn't just tell us about his characters he takes the careful time to show us.

Tsumetai nettaigyo aka Cold Fish (Shion Sono)

My introduction to the cinema of Sono came highly recommended and I certainly wasn't disappointed. While I can't speak to Sono's body of work, the strengths of Cold Fish stem from his ability to craft a unique universe that follows its own sense of space, timing, and momentum. The slow burn of Syamoto's realization of his situation as well as his transformation (or realization depending on your reading) is expressed almost entirely in side-long glances, most of which are backgrounded by the ostentatious personalities that dominate the film. It is in this balance of subtly articulated expression and over-the-top charisma, sex, and violence that creates the visceral complexities of Cold Fish. My only complaint, which may change with a second viewing, is something about the final moments felt cheap. Perhaps cheap is not the best word, but it felt as though it was supposed to be more shocking or unnerving than it actually was. I found the transformation of Syamoto to be less interesting than the events and relationships that brought him there. It could simply be a matter of a brilliant momentum suddenly deflating, but the film is still incredible.

Mark of the Whip 2 (Roman Nowicki)

A huge improvement on the first installment, which was little more than badly shot porn with a few fumbled ideas. Mark of the Whip 2 is a work of a more assured and deliberate vision, transforming the themes and imagery of the S/M video into a coherent universe. The second installment is a fascinating exploration of affect in how Nowicki utilizes the limitations of no-budget sleaze to a great effect. The women/subs all speak in a flat affectless droll and are Eastern European models of a specific build while the men/doms wear fleshy masks (akin to Trash Humpers) and speak through voice synthesizers. The result enhances how the film narrativizes the playfulness of S/M sex. The film is a sequence of clearly staged 'scenes' with sexual performers taking on roles. The noir elements, quotations of other movies, and the conviction of its artificiality make it quite entertaining as a combo-sleaze video art piece (I also really dig the digital textures). The opening scene of the woman in the studio fabricated park is perhaps its strongest singular moment. However, procedural whipping scenes can be a bit boring, even if your into actual S/M play.

The Last Airbender (M.Night Shyamalan)

Shyamalan is great filmmaker, but this is easily his worst and not really that great of a film. Although it has its moments. The central problem stems from Shyamalan playing against his strengths: his films are small, intimate, revolving around two or three characters who are already very familiar with each other. The Last Airbender is epic in scope, filled with many disconnected characters, and feels like two or three movies' worth of plot got crammed into a short (less than 2 hours) running time. I'm unfamiliar with the Avatar series, so I'm just going off my experience of the film. There are some beautiful sequences, and Shyamalan's attempt to visualize a live action aesthetic of the clean lines and clear blocking of a cartoon is both visually interesting and the source of much of the clunkyness. Still, a bad film by a great auteur is frequently more interesting to me than a decent film by a mediocre filmmaker.

Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceausescu aka The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica)

Perhaps the most disappointing viewing I've undertaken for this project, namely because of my intense interest in the film since its debut and being a case of reading too many raves that it simply didn't live up. The film isn't bad by any means, it's quite fascinating and full of inspired sequences and captivating moments. But I don't find it to be nearly as radical as its proponents make it out to be. There is a fine line between radical and lazy, and this film stumbles along that line. The approach is certainly noteworthy as Ujica pieces together a narrative using only archival footage. Some sequences are simply preexisting footage played in its entirety or with minimal cuts (much like The Kids Are Alright), but many are masterfully reworked to give a sense of the passage of time within a specific moment. However, by attempting to let the footage 'speak for itself' Ujica makes a number of assumptions that become increasingly problematic as the film goes on (and on and on). While Ujica never directly erases the processes of the film's construction, his lack of any traditional authorial intervention (text, narration, etc) make his aesthetic choices seem unmotivated or at least give no indication as to why he's making them. For example, why are some scenes silent and others have (corny) added sound effects and why still do others have discordant music or sounds? Why do some sequences provide a glimpse into moments of resistance to Ceausescu (mostly innocuous) while the majority of the film clings exclusively to Ceausescu himself? And at over three hours this film is asking me to do a lot of work that, frankly, I'm not interested in doing. Especially when the film seems to have one idea: Ceausescu crafted a public persona but there was trouble brewing beneath the facade of propaganda.....imagine that.

2010 film diary part II

Now that the semester has started back up my film viewing has meandered down other paths. So for the sake of frequency I might start posting for every three or four films I watch, rather than waiting to accumulate five. But who knows!

Like the last posting, these are roughly in order of preference. Intro here, part one here, and the ever-shifting 2010 ranking list on Letterboxd is here.

Hai shang chuan qi aka I Wish I Knew (Zhangke Jia)

Every Zhangke I see is its own revelation and this is no exception. But more than any other Zhangke film it reminded me of Hou's The Puppetmaster in its blending of documentary and fiction, but this could turn out to be a superficial comparison as it's been almost 10 years since I last viewed Hou's masterpiece. The shots of everyday people, most of whom look directly into the camera, exist in a strange in-between space that looks both overly composed and entirely natural. This is true particularly on the ferries, which almost appear to have rear-screen projections. The real masterstroke here is in the way Zhangke chronicles over one-hundred years of the history of Shanghai through interviews that tell intimate stories of the human consequences of social and cultural revolution. As a viewer you get an incredibly fleshed out, though always incomplete narrative of the city. Beginning with the now elderly son of a politician who was assassinated in the 1930s and winding its way slowly, deliberately to a young man born in the 80s building his fortune on the royalties of his novel and a racing career. The seismic cultural shifts are only ever inferred and only in individual experiences. And I always love a filmmaker who can elucidate the relationships between cinema and history; political upheaval and cinephilia.

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)

Coppola's most accomplished film, although Marie Antoinette remains my favorite. There is a total synthesis on display here of Coppola's thematic interests in the everyday psychology of the rich; of how they physically occupy and move through their spaces. But what makes her work so incredible is how (particularly in Somewhere) she films these psychological and emotional landscapes in an entirely physical manner. Her camera glides over and lingers on bodies, investigating the physicality of surfaces while hinting at an interior that may or may not exist. My only gripe is the final shot. While it works in context of the narrative, it came across (at least to me) as hokey in its narrative convention. Maybe I'm a cynic, maybe I need to see it again. Either way, it didn't really spoil anything.

Mistérios de Lisboa aka Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz)

Ruiz's opus is a masterpiece of representing time and memory. It's a delicate tapestry of stories within stories and flashbacks within flashbacks. But where 90% of flashbacks function as a quick and easy way to infuse a film with exposition or stakes, Ruiz makes it the very focus of his massive treatise on the passage of time. While changing shadows of the time of day signal different periods of time, every historical moment is shot through the same sobering, formal lens, making the intricately complex plot feel like one continuous moment. Human lives here amount to stories, narratives, rumors, and legends as character after character implores someone to listen to their story. As brilliant as I found this work to be, I must admit that I don't consider it Ruiz's best work. In fact I still find his 2012 film Night Across the Street to be more engaging. It's not that Lisbon is lacking in any respect, but rather that after the first part of this four and half hour film I began to lose interest, or at least, feel ambivalent towards the narrative even as the images continued to captivate me. My feelings may shift over time as my viewing experience fades into memory, but as for now it remains a beautiful, but cold aesthetic object.

Tangled (Nathan Greno, Byron Howard)

I'll admit to not being all that interested in contemporary Disney animated features, but Tangled is a solid effort that echoes the playfulness and tight execution of the Disney renaissance films of the late 80s and early 90s. More than anything it recalls Aladdin in both tone and structure, not to mention a couple musical numbers here and there.  It's strengths lie in how well Greno and Howard work with the Disney formula (there's nothing new here), but Tangled goes a long way to exemplify that with great studio films it is more important (or at least, interesting) in how a story is told, not necessarily what that story is. While the film stands on its own, I like to compare it to the inferior-yet-more-successful Frozen (sorry to go Armond White on you here), which fails in every conceivable way to do what Tangled makes appear effortless. I can't recall the last time I was this enthralled by a Disney musical...maybe it was Aladdin when I was six.


Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau)

The only thing of interest here is the staging of the final fight inside the World's Fair dome, which has a visually appealing simulacra thing going on. Otherwise Iron Man 2 is offensive in almost every conceivable way. To be fair, it appears to be designed for small boys who are socialized into a world of generic 'bad ass' iconography: AC/DC music, muscle cars, babes, and good guys defeating bad guys. I could possibly forgive the reprehensible nature of its plot if anything on display here had a little more weight to it. Favreau is too gutless to go full Michael Bay, which is really where this film points towards, but without the visual invention of the corporate auteur. What is left is a visually lazy and barely competent action movie that treats action like a series of sexy and/or cool poses with little concern for the connective tissue that could hold it all together.

2010 film diary part I

The first crop of 2010 films with my brief first impressions. As stated in a previous post, all films saw their debut (anywhere) in 2010. These are roughly in order of preference, although there's a significant gulf between the Kluge and Malice. I'm going with my gut over some numerical system, sorry I'm not very scientific.

Coming Attractions (Peter Tscherkassky)

Tscherkassky reworks black and white footage of commercials to create what is essentially a curation of several short films. In the manner of the presentation of multiple early cinema works, Coming Attractions is comprised of eleven segmented works, each with a title card. While much has already been said about Tscherkassky placing early cinema in direct dialogue with the avant garde by way of Tom Gunning and his cinema of attractions, the presentation makes this immediately clear as it felt like hitting play all on an Edison or Méliès DVD. Like Tscherkassky's Outer Space, the films create a universe that exists within the film elements and is constantly breaking down and exploding, sometimes creating moments of mesmerizing beauty and at others feeling like a hellish dimension of pain. Here, Tscherkassky uses mostly images of beautiful models trapped in some world of repetition, but there are also a few normal looking people and plenty of segments of sheer abstract wonderment. I enjoyed Coming Attractions without knowing anything about its production or the dialogues that it is engaging in, which has always been my attraction to Tscherkassky's work: they are just as enthralling seen cold.

Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller)

Watching all three Robinson films at once illustrates how they function as all of a piece. Certainly the latest installment is the most different, being made after the death of narrator Paul Scofield and utilizing a different structuring device that presents the material as found footage. That said, Ruins is on par with the previous two films from the 90s and depending on your taste for this stuff, is just as incredible. While some of the environmental predictions may seem a bit pat in a post-Inconvenient Truth, post-Godfrey Reggio landscape, the intricate ways Keiller connects these dots with the centuries long rise of private property and capitalism in Great Britain is on a level of nuance that most any environmentally conscious filmmaking seems incapable of achieving (baring of course Miyazaki). These works create an interesting dialogue with the other British BBC-funded essayist, Adam Curtis. Both are engaged in a genealogy of English ideologies, but whereas Curtis often goes for the melodramatic, Keiller plays like a chamber piece. My only criticism is that unlike the previous two Robinson films Keiller here experiments with long, lingering takes that break up the flow of the narrative and images. Typically, these are shots of combines harvesting fields and they provide some thinking room to digest the complex narration about farmer's revolts and U.S. military installations, but they tend to run too long in my estimation and seem to really break up the final act. They feel like interlopers from an entirely different film.

How to Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders)

Perhaps I've been spoiled on too much Zizek and Halberstam, but computer animated children's movies immediately become exercises in ideology for me. The film suggests that barbaric warfare is the result of misunderstanding their 'enemy,' but the solution is not to stop fighting, but to transform said enemy into precision airstrike weapons to sift through what dragons can be utilized and what dragons must be destroyed. It certainly felt a lot like the drone rhetoric that has become ubiquitous in studio action films since this time period. But not that I can't enjoy them as films, and How to Train Your Dragon certainly leads the pack of many in the genre. What makes this a stand out for me is that the filmmakers first and foremost tell a story by thrusting you into the world they've created with minimal exposition on every facet of this fantasy world. My problem with so much of contemporary fantasy is it has no flair for pacing and movement, instead elevating drawn out explanation of mythos to the most privileged level. Dragon certainly avoids that as well as features some of the most visually compelling action sequences of any movie from its release year, particularly the final showdown in the clouds, which is a masterpiece of environmental textures and pacing.

Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx - Eisenstein - Das Capital
News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx - Eisenstein - Capital (Alexander Kluge)

Also known as the "theatrical" or "cinema" version, I'm not entirely sure how to classify this film as it's technically a short-hand cut of Kluge's massive 570 minute 2008 work of the same name and concludes with a plug for the DVD release of the longer film. This breezy 83 minute rendition strings together segments of radically diffuse styles that essay the idea of making a contemporary film on/about/of Marx's Capital, based on the notes written by Sergei Eisenstein of his film version that never materialized. Without much to compare it to, this version felt an awful lot like a more didactic Godard film, blending staged character interviews with low-quality found footage, the filmmaker playing a version of himself onscreen, and a playful approach to text (that sometimes became tedious near the end as it felt like watching a PowerPoint presentation). I'd imagine that the 570 minute version is profoundly insightful, but here many of the segments feel only tangentially related leaping from a consideration of colonial silk production to fake interviews with laid off workers, although Kluge's ability to move quickly through such dense material is quite impressive. Of note is the Tom Tykwer short film embedded in the middle of the feature that explores every material detail of an image through tracing its industrial history, which stands alone as its own complete work, as well as the section on how James Joyce considered only Eisenstein or Walter Ruttmann as capable of adapting Ulysses.

Malice in Lalaland (Lew Xypher)

Easily the worst film I've encountered since beginning this project. Parts of this Sasha Grey porn vehicle harken back to the 16mm adult films of the 70s, where plot and mutual pleasure where paramount to the film's appeal. But this is hack work even by the lowest of adult film standards. Attempting to create a sexy, dark Alice in Wonderland film, Xypher instead presents choppy sex scenes lacking in any erotic element broken up by long-winded sequences of characters walking through spaces. It's quite baffling how perfunctory and boring the sex in this film is. Essentially a chase film, Malice (Grey) escapes a mental institution only to be pursued through various dilapidated Americana locations by a hapless warden who we must watch fumble through horrific slapstick sequences. What's fascinating is how the chase sequences are so incompetently belabored, like kids making a movie with their parents camcorder in their back yard, yet the sex scenes are choppy montages of various positions punctuated by sterile 80s-style penetration shots. The filmmakers seem to have spent all of their energy and focus on the production design, which is pretty incredible, but merely shuffled their performers through boring plot sequences and even worse sex scenes. In more ways than one it reminded me of The Boondock Saints: a dip-shit fan boy desperately trying to make something "badass."

Best of the Decade So Far Project: 2010 edition

For 2015 I'll be undertaking a blogging project assessing the films of the decade thus far, as 2015 marks the halfway point of the second decade in the 21st century.

I'm primarily doing this for fun and to shore up my critical opinions on the films made in the era where cinema is supposedly dead.

I've been actively seeing and documenting as many new films as possible since 2010; I've made lists and notes that never amount to much except to clutter my desk top. So this project is a way to put some of these viewing experiences to use in case anyone else is interested in such an endeavor. 2010 seems too recent to be properly historical and not quite remote enough to warrant engaged critical excavation.

This project will be a bit unwieldy. My ultimate goal is to build up to a thorough Best of the Decade So Far list that encompasses 2010 to 2014. However, I am far from systematic and refuse to use any sort of criteria. This is, after all, a personal project. So my gut will be the deciding factor. If this pans out, I will do a series for each year, but for now I'm focusing exclusively on 2010.

Project Guidelines

I'll be adhering strictly to 2010 debuts, which I will determine through a triangulation of imdb, KG, and if the film has a home video release or press kit that determines its debut date. I realize this is arbitrary and many films that debut in one year are not actually seen until the next, but I'm choosing this to clear up confusion and make the process easier for me. So anything that actually debuted in a festival in 2009 will not be considered for 2010. For example Life During Wartime is listed on imdb as having debuted in 2009 at Telluride, but the Criterion Collection release lists it as a 2010 release. Here I defer to imdb.

List-o-mania

I'll be using Letterboxd to keep these lists organized and so far I have two to start with:

2010 film's I've already seen (ranked) here

2010 film's I've yet to see (alphabetized) here

My current Top 10:

The Strange Case of Angelica (Oliveira)
Attenberg (Tsangari)
Film socialism (Godard)
Resident Evil: Afterlife (W.S. Anderson)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul)
The Sleeping Beauty (Breillat)
Unstoppable (T. Scott)
You, the World, and I (Rafman)
The Expendables (Stallone)
Jackass 3D (Tremaine)

My Top 10 to see:

The Autobiography of Nicolas Ceausescu (Ujica)
Cold Fish (Sono)
Curling (Côté)
Easy A (Gluck)
Hereafter (Eastwood)
In the Shadows (Arslan)
L.A. Zombie (LaBruce)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Ruiz)
Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (Torres)
Step Up 3D (Chu)

My plan of action is to rewatch some key films that I believe my positions may have shifted on, such as The Social Network (which I disliked), Tiny Furniture (which I liked), as well as Certified Copy, Meek's Cutoff, and  Poetry (all of which are a bit hazy on the details for me).

To rectify the reality that much of my viewing consists of theatrical narrative features and auteur festival films, I'm planning on watching as much direct-to-video, erotica, pornography, and avant garde film and video shorts as I can.

Format

There is no official format for how I will post stuff here. I'll have more to say on some films than on others. I plan on posting a series of round-ups of brief reflections. Once I've seen enough I'll start making various lists, favorites, worst films, underrated titles, etc.

Also, I'm motivated most strongly by personal recommendations, so any film that you think deserves a rewatch or that I've missed entirely, please let me know in the comments.

Caterpillar (Wakamatsu / 2010)

Caterpillar (Kôji Wakamatsu / 2010)

It's as if Kôji Wakamatsu doesn't care that filmmaking techniques have changed in the decades since the 1960s. His approach to staging, camera placement, and visual effect are untouched by the sensibilities that shifted in the transformation of 16mm to digital production (although my understanding is that Caterpillar was shot on 35mm). The result is a film comprised of uncomfortable aesthetic dissonance that has been received as lazy or lacking a requisite amount of subtly in order to be taken seriously.

At times Caterpillar has the freshness of the radical techniques he pioneered in the late 60s and at other times it feels the strain of amateur filmmaking; of someone trying hard to make their low-rent drama look like the big leagues. I found myself imaging how I would receive the sequences of the villagers sending Tadashi off to war if they were shot with grainy 16mm. The sequences are disarmingly simple without the artifacts of old film stocks to give a comfortable materiality. It often feels like staged reenactments filmed with a spectator's video camera. This simplicity, for me, shares  the affective qualities of a recorded live performance, particularly the distant sex scenes inside the house. But Wakamatsu's combination of visually unappealing newsreel footage with plain straightforward dramatic filmmaking pushes back against the aesthetics of nostalgia that have come to dominate so much of contemporary world filmmaking regarding the World War II period. To add, Wakamatsu includes flashbacks of Tadeshi's brutal rape of a Chinese woman, which combine simple visual effects such as layering color flames over black and white footage and a digital grain filter to create what looks like abstract video art.

While so much of the narrative is uncomfortably forthright (one could say embarrassingly so in some cases), the film is anchored in a rather sly series of shifting subject positions. Amid the yelling and smashing of eggs the wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima) and the paraplegic 'War God' Tadashi (Keigo Kasuya) re-position themselves in relation to the national ideologies of patriotism that forcibly give their experiences meaning. At various points they are at odds with or embracing the roles that have been thrust upon them by the villagers and the radio (who speak the same language). Caterpillar is at once an underhanded contemplation of the machinations of power within ideological structures while at the same time being a rather blunt, unambiguous dramatization of individual emotional responses to these social structures.

note: these thoughts are shaped by 1. not having seen Wakamatsu's other late period works United Red Army (2008), Petrel Hotel Blue (2012), or 11 - 25 jiketsu no hi: Mishima Yukio to wakamono-tach (2012) and 2. having watched Caterpillar on Netflix instant streaming, the transfer of which seems to be of low quality.