Saturday, December 24, 2022

Papa Mike's Video #29: Francois Truffaut's A GORGEOUS KID LIKE ME (1972)

(In a reverse of the usual for this series, this is actually a title - via Region 4 DVD which is the only way I could get it 2nd hand online - that will be a holiday gift as opposed to titles that I borrow to watch and review)


The wonderful Bernadette Lafont definitely gets to go BIG here, and probably it's a more accentuated, dialed to 11 register than we may be used to seeing from Truffaut performers. But this "girl" Camille Bliss (even Frank Miller wouldn't think to name a character that in his pulp fiction) is a human hurricane with the kind of personality that draws in hapless dopes like Clovis and Arthur (Mr Exterminator Man) and a 2nd-rate crooner named Sam Goldin (meant to be a play on Sam Goldwyn I wonder, probably just a coincidence), among others.


While Dussollier and Kreis are the newcomers (Truffaut plucked them both from film school, and they have to carry a lot here and she as Helene manages to be the anchor to reality the narrative needs and does it convincingly), Denner, Marchand and Leotard have been seen in films before and were in films after, and they also manage to find the registers for their respective dummy egocentric just sometimes weirdo men who either think they've lucked into something amazing with Camille, or they (or really just Clovis) go to mad-man things like taking a gun and shooting this way and that.


This leads to a conclusion that is rather bleak and probably cynical, but I can't carp. A Gorgeous Girl Like Me is Truffaut in a tone and pace that is black-acidic comedy, where it's all about a human telling someone else (here it being the opposite sex is a factor for sure, women-male power dynamics et al) how terrible they are and the other person being like "oh, fascinating, tell me more - for Sociology!" 

At the same time what's strong about the movie is also the thing that one can't help but criticize - it's all so breakneck in its pace, whether it's Lafont talking without a breath to the gullible Dussollier or when she is running around from one place or one man in a room to another, that you want it to take a breather just fot a beat or two. And halfway through, I thought I'd have that criticism of Camille as well, like too one note as a black widow, albeit one who often gets these doofuses on a silver platter.

But by the end, once we find out what happens to Dussollier's Stan and how he gets double crossed, it makes sense why Truffaut (adapting from a book) and Lafont are playing it this way. And, I may not have stressed this enough in this review: this is funny, and the comedy hits like 85% of its targets (including a door gag that had me rolling).

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Sergei Bondarchuk's WAR AND PEACE (1965-1967)

 

So... I decided to watch all of this over the course of 12 hours (I would've finished it sooner but Jack's gotta sleep sometimes).  As I was watching I wrote reviews of all four parts and compile them here for easier reading.


PART 1: ANDREI BOLKANSKY (1965)


"Death, wounds, the loss of my family - all this for nothing. I'd give everything for a moment of glory, for an instant of triumph and the love of people I do not know nor will ever now... and what if there were nothing left but to die? Well, if I have to, I will die brave as anyone."


With very little competition, I'd say this contains the most staggering *large scale* war sequences put to film. There have been more sustained filmed set pieces of course - Saving Private Ryan sure, and Chimes at Midnight - but this is a production putting this many bodies and those many souls and guns and everything and just... HOW?! It's dizzying and stimulating and it's a seven layer cake of grandiosity.

And for as high flying and free the camera is (and apparently Bondarchuk and his team created new ways to grt cameras to move up high and without the lugubrious cranes of old), how it careens and pivots and captures what had to have been thousands (tens of thousands?) of extras and hundreds of horses and all of the violence and carnage (not too bloody but pronounced enough to leave an impact), it's the quiet moments and humanity that draws me in: The scene where the one officer cant describe how his men fled so Andrei, recognizing his man cant say it, does so for him. Or more specifically that "Majestic" moment where Andrei is looking up at the "glorious sky" and it opens up for him like heaven, and how Bondarchuck films it is filmed at just the right speed and the clouds move so serenely that you almost forget that this is a man approaching death. Or, perhaps, there's no mistaking it.

And then in part 2, a bit about Pierre's duel in the snow with Dolokhov (*Bondarchuk's best acting to this point)... I'm sure I would have done the same. Or close to it. I'm sure I'd have that confounded reaction. That scene in and of itself is a dark, searing poem about pain and death and pride (how that stuff shirt in that uniform positions himself with that gun and aims even when all is lost), and it speaks to how potently Bondarchuk understands that he can and absolutely had to use the tools of Cinema at his disposal and push them forward. So he has what must have been a giant camera to have to move around, but maybe the government had lighter-weight ones too so his operators create a world that is disorientation and unease and despite all the regal rituals and great meals and musical accompaniment it's all so shaky because human beings maintain this world.

He knew he should've remembered to DVR the Oscars, damn it!


And as for Lise... Ill never forget that face after that moment with the wind blowing through 🥺 that's the other thing that's so masterful about this, how Bondarchuk uses sound: the dripping of the water around Pierre gets under your skin just as much as the wind when that death happens pierces your heart. It's like the cold of the Earth is what killed her, not even the baby. He understands how to control and manipulate the camera, like when it becomes untethered and hand held and wild and unwieldy, but he also understands that what we hear, how a silence after so much noise will move us even more deeply than mayhem.

This is an adaptation that doesn't fear to be literary, but uses literary devices of narration to almost experimental effect: how a voice will be coming from perhaps someone's mind, but maybe from beyond and ethereal, with multiple narrators. Scorsese must have seen this and soaked in it like an acid trio in a whirlpool.

"I am not saying it is logic that convinces. What convinces is seeing someone close to you disappear...there... into nowhere, leaving you starting down into the abyss. I stared into it."

(*anyone else think Bondarchuk looks like Rod Steiger? Interesting to think the coincidence that Steiger at the same time was filming Doctor Zhivago, the Hollywood epic version of something like this)


PART II: NATASHA ROSTOVA (1965)

"You will learn to know yourself within a year."

"... a whole year?!"

"The actual life of real people went on as usual."

Sergey Bondarchuk understood that no matter how many men and women are dressed to the nines in the most extravagant costumes, gowns and 19th century uniforms galore, and how much the music can soar and the camera can go around and move up high in that sumptuous and sensational ballroom, it's the incredible face of Savelyeva as Natasha, done almost like a split-diopter (though I wonder if that's really it technically how they did it), her profile looking on in quiet desperation for someone to take her hand to dance and make her "His" that leaves the absolute heart-pounding impression. Someone take her hand, blast it all! That distance is more powerful and resonant than any opulent piece of regal theater.

And of course when Andrei does, and Pierre looks on... a whole other dynamic for the film, where before we've seen these two men as great friends, things crack open to a more emotional volatile level (even if the two men don't even realize it'll happen yet). An equally sensitive moment is that engagement note of one year between Andrei and Natasha; it's amazing how powerful in 70mm a push-in on a face can be when it's done to precise emotional precision. There's also a sublime set piece when Natasha and Anatol and some of the other main characters are watching a concert and how Bondarchuk shows all of their faces, looking, thinking, holding back but making eyes, you can understand in these matter of minutes what is happening inside of Natasha, what can her heart do with all of this(?)

On the whole, I don't know if I entirely loved this as much as the first part (the section at the section at the cabin drags until Natasha dances to the guitar), and there's an odd bit of soft focus and those strange splices of like diamond-images as Natasha dances with this new man after the concert. But Bondarchuk gets to show us his whole heart, and understanding of what Tolstoy understood as far as romantic reckoning, as an artist (with himself too as someone who can look like the saddest man who looks like a boy in his suit that fits him so ill), and this is necessary for the rest of the story to click. And then there's a surprisingly graphic scene involving wolves and dogs attacking each other during a hunt. Woof.

I bet Michael Cimino must've seen *that* ballroom dance set piece and thought 'shit, I can do one better' and... that's another story.


PART III: THE YEAR 1812

Sadly, he's not about to break into song

As the Marx Brothers once sang, we're going to war!


And yes yes the gigantic battle, but what about that minute of film when the like 200 or so men strip down and into the water for that skinny dip? 😳

"Enough. Enough, mankind."

The Year 1812, a masterpiece of a film unto itself, includes such an insane series of battle tableaus, and at first not even so much for how it's shot or edited - though there are absolutely a number of compositions and movements that are chaotic, though a kind of controlled chaos, like we trust where all this delirium is going, including cross fades that emphasize a nightmare scenario of bodies and masses/movements and at least one shot that could be called from the point of view of a bullet, and another that might be Andrei's soul leaving himself - rather than for everything of total madness by way of the decisions by the Russian side that happened in the battle of Bordillo. There's a point where Andrei's men are told to be in reserve... and we learn in voice over a third of the men are lost when "at ease" .... and this is at the height of damage in the battle! Not that it would seem, of course, they could've done much in the face of Napoleon's multitudes of rampage and military might.

This may my very well be a battle sequence put to film that puts so many others to shame or just to challenge. If I were a filmmaker staging a battle scene today I'd look on and possibly despair, and this is from the mid 1960s (albeit this is also filmmaking that is unbound by concerns like a tight budget or resources), and it feels so small and puny to watch this on a small screen. There does come a point once it's an hour in and there's not a lot of time for dialog or even much narration; it's a series of cascading Dolly shots and flying camera movements, like the lens barely can keep up with the explosions and masses of horses and people with their guns and bayonets going in so many different directions it's hard to tell up from down or left from right.


 
I don't think it's an accident that this is in a way such a disorderly shot and edited film when it comes to telling what's happening at the height of the carnage; on the contrary that's actually it's major strength. There are points when Bondarchuk and his collaborators create the kind of cinema that I've only seen a handful of other filmmakers achieve (Coppola in Apocalypse Now as one example, and Ryan in D-Day but even then that's more polished than this) which is this sense of presenting war as something that is not exciting but is completely terrifying and devastating.


Anyone from any part of the globe watching this can yell this battle is going extremely badly for the Russians. But by the time we get to that general claiming they're fighting the enemy back and he'll attack tomorrow while a giant napkin is on his chest, you know the chaos has reached unbearable proportions. This is so big that it's almost too big even for the filmmakers to contain, like God's unrelenting POV is here.

"Lullaby, lullaby."

I am slightly confused why Pierre stuck it out for the entire battle, though it is fascinating to see how the other soldiers are kind of amused by his presence (a Gentleman you say). But him being there does raise the stakes on a personal level; his sense of bravery is at the expense of the disarray of what's in this battle. What I come away with watching this and km sure others have as well is that there is no glory in what we are seeing. This is called a "moral victory" and words like "impotence" are spoken in the narration, but all of the bodies, all the dead, all in gray and dark hues on screen, caked in mud and crap and refuse and blood (though the blood isn't shown as graphically as in more modern cinema), this isn't meant to be inspiring - quite the opposite. The Year 1812 is staggering to behold.

To quote another man in a war scene: "I've never seen so many men wasted so badly."



PART IV: PIERRE BEZUKHOV (1967)


Somewhere at some time in the past twenty years, George Lucas watched this and said at the end, "you know, you can do all that with computers now."


There's so much I can write about this part, which displays Bondarchuk's daring but also his deep well of humanity (it may have been from the novel, but there's still heart to those moments with the freezing abandoned French soldiers; such men were pillaging and destroying the city of Moscow, but this filmmaker still shows a bold amount of compassion, or at least doesn't revel in their sorrow, as the men sing together in the face of certain death). And when I say daring I don't mince words: he shows here what he's done throughout his epic but even more so, that he and his collaborators are willing and able to try any and everything to raise cinema to another plane of consciousness. Just the moment when Andrei is seeing (perhaps) what his death may be, as a small figure superimposed in an abyss going through a door to meet his end would be enough for most directors to say they created something unique in the span of their careers. For Bondarchuk, it's just another scene in the span of so many others.

But what is so impactful about War and Peace, this part and the entire film in its four parts, is that it was a giant film, giant in its full SOUND, like you're seeing a sort of visual symphony, to be ostentatious about it, and Bondarchuk is constantly taking risks. When in this part, for prime example, Pierre is in Moscow as the city is being burned down piece by piece, and there are dozens if not hundreds of extras, many moving parts, and there is chaos on screen, but the storytelling manages to walk a very tight rope to not become too chaotic, if that makes sense. It's like Bondarchuk is discovering all the tools at his disposal, figuring out new ways to turn a camera around on its axis, and it all fits as a piece (think like Michael Bay if it wasn't mean and had heart, or Michael Cimino with less drag).

This is a sequence of scenes and set pieces where Pierre is at a loss what to do, in particular including a woman in a panic for her child (who is possibly in a burning building), and Pierre somehow manages to get someone to help him to find the child, and then... he returns with the crying tiny person and the mom isn't there. Will he be imprisoned and then what will happen to her? There is a direction for the character to go in this scene, in other words, and so it's something for the pandemonium to be tethered to. Even when it becomes more of a poetical/hyper-cinematic subjective mode, where Bondarchuk and the editors keep cutting back to his face as we are seeing the soldiers' destruction and fires blazing this way and that, you never think "oh they don't know what they're doing." It's like following how a mind or a brain processes trauma, which is in shards and pieces and fragments.

There's high melodrama, high operatic beats, whether it's Natasha and her mother reacting in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS to the worst possible news imaginable, or the French soldiers in the snow becoming the worst versions of themselves (those poor horses), or those shots in the sky where it seems like God, or a God, has taken the controls of the impossibly for 1965 nimble drone camera (and it's *not* a drone) and turned this into a prayer of some kind about our place in life and what it means to do good or evil in the world. I do think the ending is too abrupt - from what I've read the filmmakers cut the denouement from the Novel where it cuts ahead to 1820 when they're in middle age and the next round of war is coming soon, cyclical and all - especially given all the characters have been through, like it is Missing a real final moment or conversation between Pierre and Natasha after *everything* they've experienced (Andrei, too).

But it's hard not to see this as standing so tall and, actually, free as a piece of art. So many films, even ones by great commercial directors and auteurs, have to be beholden at points to demands of the market or for tastes that ultimately put something personal in a box (even my lords Scorsese and David Lynch or Werner Herzog, Bunuel, are working in a genre the majority of the time). Bondarchuk isn't ignorant of what an epic war/romance film should have, but it's staggering what he gets in here that is less beholden to modern film (certainly to epics of the time like David Lean or Anthony Mann would do) and more to the epics of silent film, to experimental cinema. It's like Abel Gance and (on a good day) Terrence Malick working on a canvas together at times, but even then this is still a personal work by this director- not least because he's also the star (and a good actor at that, if not a perfectly cast man, ie maybe someone younger would be better).



So, yeah, good movie.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Happy Birthday, Martin Scorsese - THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)


Figured for an (80th!) Birthday, on the eve of anyway, time to revisit one of the films of Martin Scorsese's that I have seen the least (maybe just once straight through!)  I'm glad I did.  

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Of course given his own innumerable references to other films, in interviews and lectures as well as his own pictures, the simplest thing to jump to is "Martin Scorsese's Barry Lyndon" as the touchstone here for its complete pictorial and effervescent splendor, that like 90% of any single frame here is a painting quite almost literally through precise costume, framing, soft but not sickeningly sweet soft lighting and shadows that emphasize an inner turmoil that runs deeper than for almost any of the characters in the "grittier" Scorsese work - not just that shot, but *that* one, and heavens how about that other one with Olenaka standing by the pier not turning around, or Newland in the flower shop or the one the one I gotta stop now.  But what I find most telling is an introduction the NYFF restoration some years ago, where he was thinking a bit about the scene from Citizen Kane where Mr Bernstein is describing seeing the girl on the ferry and "not a day goes by I don't think about her," and that's it, in all it's equal simplicity and complexity: longing for what was, a nostalgia for a time and place that shaped someone into not the best one could be, but... it's what it is? 
 
I saw this sometime in high school or maybe college, and like another Winona Ryder film by another American filmmaker titan of the same period, Coppola with Dracula, I either took it for granted or just wasn't so mature or cinema literate enough to appreciate it more (or I simply hadn't become much of an adult to understand what, true burning down your f*****g heart alive, love means to have and to hold - luckily in my case I found it, but that's another story).  I thing the "Love that Dareth Not Speak" with this intense Emotional Affair isn't a new thing to see in cinema, but it's how a filmmaker can go about it, making the subjects in the matter become alive, that is what counts.  This is one of the most gorgeously rendered visions of a world of another time of my generstion, and yet in its way the trap of opulence and a society that is violent and unforgiving in its etiquette that sticks with one as much after as during the film. 

This is a world that is meant to be the Top of the Heap, as an old fashioned person might put it today, but when you are formed and shaped by it, and someone may confuse weakness with a loyalty to that world (or is it the other way around), it's hard to break from it.  Newland could, but maybe he couldn't.  And maybe The Countess Olenska would have trouble as well - but just simply that moment where she describes to Newland about the simple feeling of being FREE, well... that shakes him to his core.




Day Lewis, Pfeiffer and, though I wonder if she was slightly less appreciated due to seeming to be playing more of a "shallow" character but there's more there, Ryder, are phenomenal, mostly for how much I'm sure Scorsese gives them time in every scene to *show* so much.  I especially like how it's the women who get to really lead the way for many of the scenes, even if it seems like DDL is doing his IM THE MOST INTENSE ACTOR OF ALL TIME thing in restrained costume decor.  But unlike another film not quite of this period but close enough that I saw earlier this year with him, A Room with a View, where he was somewhat similarly repressed and bourgeois, Day Lewis understands that Archer is a good person deep down and has a firm intelligence... but that goodness and firmness is as much a hindrance as an asset.  I liked that be found this middle ground between holding back things in some moments but most often it's very easy to read what's going on on his face.  How some of the characters don't comment on it more regularly maybe speaks to a more fundamental horror lurking underneath this world of refinery.

But it is the women who make their mark the most, and it's maybe the ultimate example that has to be given to people who say that this director only makes "Guy" movies.  I'd call BS on that anyway given the 50 examples off the top of my head of great women characters in Scorsese pictures.  At the same time, Ellen and May and Pfeiffer and Ryder by extension are so so effective in what they're given to do and, like the best actors, they go a little further - just see how much or how little they may pause before certain (very pivotal) lines or how a look can be given right back to Newland to such an extent that it's like a dagger, or like a tease, or like a true beat of innocence. 




Case in point, late in the movie I turned to my wife and said 'do you think May knows?' And this does get answered more or less, but in the moment it's still played with perfect, delicious ambiguity as it is in life- sometimes someone knows if another in a relationship feels a way about someone else, or maybe it's just part of one.  At any rate, while it is (arguably) Pfeiffer's greatest work of her career, Ryder shouldn't be underestimated for what she does just as, in her seemingly mild way, as fforcefully. Lest not forget, after all, May is a product of her environs and, as with Archer, too good to say the wrong thing most often (the one time she broaches the disconnect between them he shoots it down, and it's quite a delicate moment of tense drama). 

This is, again like Coppola's Dracula, grand opera rendered on film (via Columbia again no less), though the difference here is the characters don't, or can't, or won't, just GO for their emotional register.  It's no less a tragedy, except this is about decorum as opposed to Grand Gugnol.  It's (yawn) another masterpiece, overflowing with a love of what atmosphere and language can do to a character piece, but to call it that maybe underrates what deeper themes about conformity and loss this wrestles with.  Like the dishes we see in the film, it's easy to call it beautiful.  A life has to be made out of what is left.  

Thursday, September 22, 2022

RIP Train: Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) & THE IMAGE BOOK (2018)

 














End of Cinema, 50 years later...


(Bela Lugosi looking down on this series of scattered movie clips, with the occasional but repeated intertitle like "1: REMAKES" even though there arent any, like a drunken Godard was flipping channels on his mega-cable package): Look at them... all of those cinemas... with their own... personalities...


Or, the longest and most deranged-poetic Alamo Draft-house Pre-show ever - for a movie about Trains, apparently.


Ok, trains, we have something to tether ourselves to here... as for the region of Dofa where Godard is often in whispers ruminating on political strife and corruptions and slaughter of a kind... shrug.


Well... it is pretty, even if it's there simply because... ocean. Waves. Serenity. Or madness?


Here's what I can tell you that I gather from the Swiss-Franco anarchic poetic Madman on his final outting: I don't know what all of this means. The Image Book is less of a documentary or a video essay than it is, like several of Godard's late era work up to and including the Histor(ies) of Cinema (where even putting 'ies' in parentheses is part of the semantic goof or provocation) that the idea is to throw a lot at the proverbial wall and that some of it may stick and some of it may shock you. At the least for me it was a pleasure to not see like I did with Goodbye to Language 3D the equivalent of someone poking me in the eye and 20 minutes of home video of a dude's dog (not saying his dog isn't in this but maybe 30 seconds at most, but I digress... can I digress here?)


I can vibe with many of the film clip choices that Godard plays around with here, and sometimes it appears like a carefully crafted but still precisely scattershot series of classic bits from some films that Godard maybe wrote about back in his Cashiers days (Johnny Guitar and Vertigo) and some not (Freaks and yep there are some of the more notorious bits of Salo 120 days of Sodom too), and it creates this impression of a delirious cinematic fresco, like action and romance and intrigue - Bergman reaching for an object in Notorious for example - and even if I cant get the full meaning of how his words spoken in whispery/gravely narration add up, it's still arresting on a pure stylistic level.


Where it loses me more and where it feels like I should have the Press Notes or footnotes to keep up, and that shouldn't ever be the case for anybody, is when in the 2nd half (or fuck what half, isn't it more like 5/8ths I dunno) when he gets into more of the material around an Arab region called Dofa I think, and while it's clear he knows what he is talking about, it's mostly from his own perspective. In other words, there is a story about political strife and corruptions and even what sounds like religious persecution and murder, but it's obtuse. There was a time Godard said he believed a movie should have a beginning middle and end but not necessarily in that order, but now it's less like that and more like he had an assortment of a few dozen words he had from playing Wordle and threw up the words in the air and arranged them at random.


I think there could be something to Godard telling this story, or even just the horrific and tragic events, of Arab disagreements even down to who is who and what to believe about what's happening (does it skirt up to the line of anti antisemitism... uh, maybe?) But there's nothing here for one to latch on to who is who - if I knew about these people before or even the circumstances of the strife then I might engage on an intellectual level. Emotionally, it's still nill.. so what's accentuated is experiencing like disassociative identity disorder in action, with brilliantly harsh colors and hard edits, and it becomes so much while not being a lot substantively. Or, no that's not true, Godard is making a few deep or true points, in his odd poetic verbiage. But since it's all chaos, nothing can stick for me.


I was so flabbergasted by this i took a photo with my phone...


He even has echoes to some of his past movies, some groundbreaking (Week End), some less so (King Lear), and I dont think he means it as some grand summation about what Cinema means, to him or even to wider culture, or about how violence or devastation is seen or processed on screen or in other media (internet videos more than TV news is where he seemed to get the footage of unrest and destruction/bombs in these Middle East regions). It's not a totally flat or uninteresting experience, which I can't say about all Late era Godard. It doesn't make The Image Book any less frustrating at some/many points (I did did a real laugh out loud to the intercutting between one of the people from Freaks laughing at a video of someone eating... ass), and being bewildered isn't the same thing as being in awe.


All this said, and admitting this didn't work for me on the whole, considering this as Godard's final... long-form musing, I'll kind of miss what he did with these free-form works. It's not that I can't see any other filmmakers or essayists or (dare I say) crackpots with Adobe premiere and a decent Canon 5D or whatever camera couldn't make one of these, but it's hard for me to think of any other filmmaker getting the distribution Godard got, even in his limited art-house spaces and on an international level; many of these films of the past 20 years, even the ones with something close to a "story" like with actors and staging like In Praise of Love got screened at festivals and to mostly wide acclaim by critics probably wiser or just more "into" this than me.


Rest in fragmented montage, Jean Luc.




 

Monday, August 8, 2022

HANDS ON A HARDBODY: THE DOCUMENTARY (1997)

 


"All I have to do is realize if I don't get it, I'll have to get another job and I dont want another job, I don't want to have to go back to waiting tables..."


"Theres nobody that should be in that contest, if you want to know the truth!"


We laugh now, but the show-runner/creator of Squid Game season 2 is taking notes...


You know, there's a moment about 43 minutes in when everyone starts laughing... and it's more like cackling... like this is where, at about the 40th or so hour of this competition, where the Hysteria kicks into overdrive. And I realize I am not the first one to point this out, but according to trivia Robert fucking Altman planned to make this into a fictionalized film but died before he could - and my goodness we missed out arguably on the only possible human who could top what happened in the documentary.


Hands on a Hardbody is one of those times in modern movies where you see something that's too true to be anything else than what it is: all-American, celebratory and unadalterated madness, a window into the kind of thing that George Carlin meant when he said when you're born you're given a ticket to the Freakshow, but. when in America youre given a front-row seat. That's the first impression, like who else would do this? But what if in that Freakshow there's more to it than just gawking at the local yokals with limited teeth and bad knees?

Only here, in Longview, a seemingly-small-but-not town in Texas (pop is 100k, the people maybe make it feel more in spirit), would someone have the mind to come up with this contest *over a single pick-up truck* for one thing, and then for another how popular it would become. And only here would they have rules over drug testing. Oye. I was laughing through several parts of this (Highlander, sure, but just how un-self aware everyone is to this competition insanity), and while the jerkoff cynical part of me wants to say it's like a Christopher Guest film come to life, I think I get more in the latter half why Altman was into making it into his own vision: it's like when you see Ronne Blakely sing in Nashville (the number midway through that movie), where you cringe but then your heart kind of breaks seeing her in this vulnerable moment.



I wonder if I would've been laughing more had I seen this when I was younger and a bit more ignorant. Now, having lived a while note in this world and seen how life has frankly got a lot shittier for a lot of people (whether they deserved it or not), I can't not see the absurdity of these folks while at the same time the competition, where it's consecutive hours with very limited breaks and no real chance to sleep or rest (I have to imagine microsleep was working like a motherfucker on the lot of them), brings out the humanity in these men and women. And the storytelling is clear and concise, and you get some really inspiring bits (notice when Angie is talking and then the text tells us she wins the next year).


"You experience a great camaraderie with these people. They know what it's like."


I almost love it more because of how it's presented. The documentarians - making what is a "work by" as opposed to a film even, that unpretentious - shoot on what they have available and it feels like a pure artifact. They can get so close because they don't mark a distance, like they're there to understand what's going on for these guys. You understand through what they say about their lives before this goes on, and how screwed they've been in lower working class systems that draw these people to this competition, not to mention how those in the game become closer and become energized seeing who is left and who could be next to drop off.


By a certain point, the oddball comedy floats away and you're left with raw, Texas-fried and sleep-deprived obsession, ennui and, from my perspective, the toll on these people physically and psychically and mentally (mostly physically) to go through this. And throughout, Binder and his team ask simple questions to help us understand what's going on, and the footage they culled is enough for dramatic effect. They build a suspense naturally if nothing else because as more people shed away and you're left with the final few in those last hours, you feel like you've seen these people go through a helluva thing. And when people should have a little space during the precious break times, they back off. And... and, again, over a truck.


This is pretty engrossing stuff and I'm glad I finally got to see it on DVD. PS: they apparently stopped doing this when one of the contestants went and committed suicide during a 15 minute break at K Mart.

Sunday, May 22, 2022

GEORGE CARLIN'S AMERICAN DREAM (2022)

 (Note, the first part got more write up because I just had a lot more to say on it than part 2, but I loved the whole documentary very much)














(Part 1)

"George Carlin had these dog whistles for hippies." (Re interview on Carlin in the mid 60s and the Al Sleet character)

"I hates doing those variety shows. Fuck those people, fuck that shit!" That's our George!

"'How do you want to be funny and who do you want to be funny for?'"- W Kamau Bell on Carlin's story early in his career

"I want to be an optimist, but I'd have to be a pessimistic by looking at the book.

George Carlin's story is one of the most inspirational tales of an artist in the mid 20th century - and this being against the odds of society and, at times (ie drugs), his demons.









The power of how he *became* George Carlin as *practically all of the public knows him is that he was hiding behind the suit and persona because it was what he thought he had to do to succeed - following that path he wrote for himself when he was in 5th grade to become a "Star" or whatever that means - and it took seeing what an ocean-sized gap there was in the generation ten years older than him laughing at his vaguely safe/conservative-acceptable comedy and those ten years younger who were fighting for... something else.

 It was a time for revolution, but revolution has to come from within. It was already all there though, so it was not a phony switch to make. It's like if Gregor Samsa changed into a Cockroach, but the Cockroach was fucking awesome.

This documentary (at least part 1) does a sensational job of telling this story which I knew somewhat - have I mentioned he's one of my heroes because good god watching You Are All Diseased at 15 changed my life and expanded me to understand all the bullshit that I knew was there and couldn't admit because kids aren't supposed to and fuck that - but with plenty of personal details that are initially inspiring but eventually not flattering (ie his wife Brenda left by the wayside for long stretches).

It finds a balance where it doesnt bog down on these to the point of becoming too much, but it is what it was which was a family in disarray, and that it wasnt changing once Carlin got into the 70s. It's balanced out to show him as a fiercly intelligent human being with real faults, plus everything with Brenda (she has a fall and rise here too), not to mention how cocaine changes all. It's harrowing as well as inspiring.









Aside from this, once Apatow and his co director and editors really get into what Carlin talked about in the 70s (as Jon Stewart says, going after side farts like he would the pope, and rightfully so side farts are hilarious), it is totally engrossing.

 What I think is good to see for me and I'm sure will be such a delight and wholly compelling trip is not necessarily a revelation but a reminder, as I hadn't seen or heard this material in a number of years, that Carlin was the same high-minded intellect (but with some brilliantly lowbrow taste and interests) that people think of him as from his material in the late 80s, 90s and 00s, just that he was attacking other political points at the time, ie Nixon, war on drugs, religion and other hypocrisies.

It's really all there from FM&AM on, just that one can see him honing a lot of his material, on the big subjects like going after power structures and his way of punching up, and the Little Things observational material that would create like 193829293 different comedians (not least of which Seinfeld). So... that's good too. 

But the gut punch is that near the end of part 1, his material and style started to (for some) get repetitive. He was down again... where could he go from here? I just love the man and this is a swell, exhilarating and at times revelatory tribute and biography (fun facts for me: Jack Burns really did a lot to influence Carlin in their team to liberal politics and he did a JFK imitation!)

(*would you want to meet the guy or gal who prefers his early 60s work? Maybe one exists out there! Or half a dozen!)

(PS: Hindsight and all, but kind of rich for Cheech Marin to say Carlin was "over" by the end of the 70s when I saw him and Chong in concert in 2008, the year Carlin died and left one last masterpiece with It's Bad For Ya, doing the same shtick and bits he was doing decades earlier only now very... old. But hey who knows anything)

(Part 2)








"I never fucked a Ten, but one night I fucked five Two's!"

"If you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist."

Yeah, this has fewer down-hill parts than part 1, but that's because he finally hit his stride, starting with Carnegie Hall and snowballing into his Imperial period of the 1990s.

I think really getting a deeper overview that he was writing and crafting You Are All Diseased, his 1999 landmark, in the aftermath of Brenda's death, it really makes a lot of sense where it was coming from - not to mention seeing that one acceptance speech where he talks so deeply and affectionately about her (did i tear up? I'm not made of stone, people). 

He was already bitter about humanity and Religion, but his complete scorced-earth take on that and God (aside from already being there for years as a Catholic "until I reached the age of reason") was definitely heightened by that.... and thank goodness for me and I'm sure for countless others who were so deeply affected by that special.











Knowing the personal context of that and a lot of other things makes this documentary special and important, but even if you don't have all of that prior experience with Carlin it reveals a human being who had a lot of complexity but a lot of heart, too (the key thing is how much he liked individuals, but abhorred groups), and how he was someone who liked to be alone but needed someone alone (ie Sally, his girlfriend for the last decade of his life).

PS: Did anyone else catch the one saved note that he took (or "culled") a page from JURASSIC PARK for one of his bits? Fucking icon.

Saturday, March 26, 2022

Papa Mike's Video #28: RW Fassbinder's EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY (1972-73)


(This review was written originally in parts as I watched this over a week and logged it as such on letterboxd)

 First of all, how have I missed out on the striptease artists who do a number set to Morricone's A Fistfull of Dollars theme? (Though oddly enough it's Charles Bronson who has his face randomly on a wall in the strip joint?)

I'm about two parts into this, but my main impression is this is possibly the sweetest and warmest thing RWF wrote and directed - funny what being commissioned for German PBS will make you do. And that is a key distinction to make here: before this, in context, he was still a young filmmaker doing the kind of films he wanted to do, sometimes to some very extreme places (ie after writing Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant in as legend goes 11 hours on an airplane flight, he filmed it as a two character piece with many compositions and direction only he could or would do). To bring him on for a "family" series was brave and bold for the producers at the network... and compromises would be made. But I'll get to that later.


In part 1, we are mostly introduced to Jochen and Marion (Gottfried John and Hannah Schygulla), the former a worker in a factory and the latter a woman he meets by chance when looking around at night for something while out for a parry. The two fall in love, but we are largely brought into his worklife at this factory as he has to deal with the all too commonplace super super corporatist Make Life Suck For Workers management and the early stirrings of a workers strike (or at least how Jochen finds ways to make things better and worse and then better again). Part 2 is more on Jochen's elder married couple (Ullrich and Finck) who look to find and then procure space to make a Kindergarten for kids, and come up against first bureaucratic pressures and then from local moms who are a little wary - not to mention the authorities.

What I gather so far is that... the people in these families are trying to do right by those around them, and have love and care to give, but as in everyday life you always have jerks and malcontents gumming up things. Society expects both way too much and not enough of other people, whether it's in a factory or in trying to get rent for a place, and understanding how much someone really loves you can be immediate in some ways and take longer for little beats (again, that little trip to the strip club where Jochen talks with another woman and Marion gets jealous, and we get it, I mean look at that nose.) At the same time, he makes an optimistic but still powerful case through how the supporting characters come together - the co workers, the women with their Association - that collective action does work if applied like it should.


And stylistically this is all very pleasurable to take in because Fassbinder knows he has to shoot quickly for TV (five episodes of feature length aired over five months in fall/winter 1972/73), but doesn't sacrifice making interesting and even funny compositions (all those flowers framing Schygulla's face) and keen snap zooms. He's always shooting for performance and the actors are all inhabiting these regular people to effective and moving and startling effect; but for as "normal" as they may be compared to other provocative and dolorous Fassbinder creations, they still have an edge and distinctive personalities abound (oh, Kurt Raab).



Part 3: 

Episode 3 "Franz and Ernst" wherein we have more factory/office drama as a Foreman is needed to be replaced and whether it's the bearded guy who has a lot of heart but needs to study a bit more to get to make the grade, or if it'll continue to be the straightforward and not bad but unremarkable replacement the management wants, and Jochen is given way too many of his favorite dish to eat. Oh, and Grandma continues to be Grandma. This is a series with such a generous amount of heart and spirit, it's like being surrounded by... a family with all the quirks and bad eggs and people who want to be better than they've been.


Part 4:

Or: our heroes Jochen and Marion get married and Kurt Raab, the seething, combustible madman of Fassbinder's work (between his work here, Herr R and Satan's Brew, that's a career there), uneasily agrees to a divorce from the wife he's kept under his thumb. There's a half hour reception after the very simply do e marriage where a dozen or more conversations happen and there's connections made and intrigued up and the drink makes everything flow a lot more... easily (its still PG-13 more or less).


It's also not till this part that the wonderful older woman from Ali Fear Eats the Soul is revealed to be Marion's mother, who is a little more than taken aback by the news that her daughter is marrying a "worker" and other news makes her more melancholic. In other words, this Parr is more of the flirting and talking and arguing and other highs and lows of life with couples and prospective couples. 

Oh, and children understand adults can cry, too.


part 5:

In this final segment we see the workers finally make their demands and the major change that precipitates this, of the workers being told the factory will be moved and thus inconvenience everyone, gets the workers led by Jochen and the new Foreman to organize and find that the management is... oddly amenable, or at least one of them is. This also leads to some big discussions, like Jochen asking his parents if they would be willing to swap apartments (Jochens dad has a big scene which ends not how you think), and there are some other personal strands and things.

This last episode *doesn't feel like it's an ending and this is one of its strengths as if Fassbinder means to say "hey, not everything is going to get resolved, this is up to and including the problems with the factory and the management," and there's a sort of "Wait a moment" conversation Marion has with Jochen that means to make things a little deeper with the message of worker's rights and organizing. It almost feels too easy at a point, like "hey, wait, is Fassy getting a little soft in his message of Socialism and that the owners will just acquiesce so easily" is addressed ultimately, and I find that scene elevates the series/long-film in that a life of work is never resolvable. There's always going to be disagreements and exploitation and someone finding a way to squeeze workers to do more for less or to find a profit where it wasn't before.

But this isn't to say this is all an intellectual exercise, far from it, as RW knows this has to be all about the people and how much we care about Jochen and Marion and Grandma and everyone else as far as their relationships and their trust and respect for one another (or in the case of the workers that one blonde dipstick who is always making a stink and finally gets his this episode... or did he before, I forget). It's hard not to see the politics at play here and how RWF saw so clearly in the 70s what other countries (well, America mostly) has done their damndest and unfortunately largely succeeded in the years since to erode workers rights and do away with the kind of organic unionized state of things that Jochen and everyone gets into.

I don't think he was seeing things as being all the rosy, even if it seems on first glance like things will work out for these workers; it's a very long struggle to have just the basic stuff to make a working life tolerable, and I think Eight Hours Don't Make a Day is extraordinary for how he and his collaborators keep the style straightforward enough (his zoom lens does a lot of work but notice how he will keep a shot going and only use tracking or odd angles when he has to), so the people and their highs and lows become more striking. 


It's about Ordinary People who's perseverance - lest not forget Grandma is an analogous plot line in the series with Jochen and Marion to an extent - and the realizations (and for Jochen self-actualization) of "This Must Change" make up the dramatic meat. I'm struck by how it's complications are in-between the lines in ways that usually Fassbinder makes more stark and bleak. It's his sunniest work I've seen.... which means it can still have a lot of tragedy. But the balance is powerful.  And last but not least, what a soundtrack! Janis Joplin, Velvet Underground, the Stones, Neil Young, Jesus (ok Jesus isn't there that's just for emphasis).

(*according to the documentary on the Criterion disc, there were supposed supposed to be more episodes but they didn't go through. Oh, well. What's here still makes for a compelling finish)

(PS: my original opinion still stands - Berlin Alexanderplatz has higher heights than this gets, but Eight Hours is more consistent in it's dramaturgical aims. And World on a Wire is a little greater than both of them)