Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Au Hasard Balthazar - 1966 - DVD

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Clean lines of contrast between black and white characterize this story of time-gone-by, and of its players who reconcile themselves to the personal consequences of the passage of time. Au Hasard Balthazar opens with the classical music of Schubert, an artist whose music is loosely classified as "classical" in that it follows certain structures and traditions, but is distinguished by its purposeful discordance, a musical manipulation of the form it's bound to. The first shot of the film is of a donkey suckling its mother; life begins, traditions are made, and like Schubert's sonata, those traditions will be broken.

The girl who owns the donkey keeps him throughout her childhood and as she grows through young adulthood. The routines of her life change, there is a death in the family, she falls in and out of love, and she experiences lulls of emotional and even physical pain. But the animal's presence remains constant. A tractor enters the frame in a scene on the family farm, as it pulls off the newly plowed field, one that was formally sown by the donkey-driven cart, the girl waits observantly on the cusp on the land, in utter dismay and sadness. She is threatened by the new technology because it replaces her occupation, discredits the modern necessity of her animal, and by extension alters the context of her history with the land.

The animal is a constant that defines her life; it's a companion and a signifier of what her past looked like. The donkey meanders among country fields and provincial paths, and populated cities and bustling streets, constantly crossing borders and witnessing change. The animal is a historical artifact, a piece of living history that sees change but is not effected by it. A group of young boys mock the girl's the wooden cart motored by the donkey, her only mode of transportation. She does not fit into modern culture because her antiquated past still remains in the present time. She begins to question the importance of the things in her life; she cuts ties with her childhood love, rebels, and turns to the town trouble-maker for companionship, the very person who mocked the donkey and wooden cart.

At the same time that the boy condescends to these provincial artifacts he also displays an irreverence for modernity. In one scene he and his friends pour an oil slick on the bend of the road and watch in pleasure as cars skid off the edge and crash. His insecurity with the future and disconnect with the past makes his current state of being rife with conflict and outbursts; he's searching for meaning in his life, but doesn't seem to have a history to use as a point of reference. The girl, then, is an easy target for the boy's disillusionment because she has direct contact to her past, she has a framed index of meaning and he resents it.

The girl finally reverts back to what she knows; she reunites with her childhood love and finds comfort in her native town. Her donkey suffers its inevitable fate and dies, slowly bleeding to death from a shooter's gunshot, alone amongst a flock of sheep in an open field. The girl reconciles her life to the changing future because she makes peace with her immovable past. She understands the contrast of the past and future and how that colors her present life, allowing the donkey to finally die, to stop being kicked and abused by those resentful of the past it represents. The girl makes amends with history to promise life in the future.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Clueless - 1995 - DVD

Sunday, June 25, 2006

I had an "overwhelming sense of ickiness" after watching The Break-Up this afternoon so I watched Clueless for the 88th time to help me stop "bugging." This movie might be best to see while you're "rollin' with the homies," but there didn't happen to be anyone around at such short notice, and it's not like I see my friends "sporadically" as it is, so this was a nice trip down memory lane by myself. Now I'm off to read my one "non-school book" for the week, though I'd rather see my virginity go "from technical to non-existent" before bed. Alas! As this Emma parody teaches us, "everywhere in L.A. takes twenty minutes," that is, like, not even close to the commute from here to Chicago, where the boyfriend resides. Maybe I'll ditch the book and have a "calorie fest" instead. "Whatever."

The Break-Up - 2006 - Film

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Watching Vince Vaughn get genuinely mad and scream at poor Jen Aniston is the most unsettling thing I've seen in awhile. Okay, so it wasn't really "Vince Vaughn" doing the dirty work, but he is the one reason I was excited to see The Break-Up--for the sweetness that highlights his sarcasm. His humor doesn't usually have a mean, condescending aim to it, but this time his character, Gary, was plain vindictive to his ex-girlfriend Brooke (Aniston).

I waited a long time to see the two exes fumble through the post-break-up woes, to watch them pine for each other long after it seems their relationship cannot be reconciled. But what happened instead were extended scenes of hateful and jealous screaming matches, long-takes where their anger was allowed to grow to the point that the two degrade each other's basic character until I wondered why they were ever committed in the first place.

The ex-couple's emotional and financial attachment to their condo is the hinge that supposedly forces them to remain living together, and that again reminded me that these two do not indeed belong together when their joint property value is the sole thing bonding them. Sitting in the theater it felt like witnessing an awkward flight between lovers. Rarely were there moments that mocked the irrational words and gesture of a break-up; constantly the audience had to sit through the misery of Gary and Brooke's fights that offered no perspective on these times when emotions run at an all-time high. I felt like I broke-up myself. I called my boyfriend as soon as I walked out of the theater. Sigh of relief, we're still together.

A Praire Home Companion - 2006 - Film

Friday, June 9, 2006 (opening night)

Robert Altman makes movies that I love to watch. You can rank his films from best to worst, qualifying them in terms of their historical significance or how engaging the story is, but all of them are exciting to watch for the mass-personality clashes of his characters. There's always an ensemble cast (at least judging by the portion of his filmography with which I'm familiar) and his camera that pans and zooms conspicuously among them, embellishing the disparity in their traits.

A Praire Home Companion reminded me of one of my favorite Altman flicks, Cookie's Fortune--perhaps one of the most disliked films to his credit. Here, I must insert my praise for Cookie's Fortune so as to give a bit of context of my affection for A Praire Home Companion. The former film is sweet to its southern characters, and doesn't play into Hollywood stereotypes and popular misconceptions about the slow pace of southern culture. Not all folks below the Mason-Dixon lack sophistication or are just plain dumb because of a little drawl, but surely there are a few fluttery types that emerge among that population, just like in any group of people, northern or otherwise. What makes Cookie's Fortune hilarious is the intersection of both smart and naive kinds of characters that have the ability to make a simple task absurdly complex. Altman's weaving and zooming camera embellishes that. It's unbelievable and plain funny to see those characters move about the same space, for such different reasons, topple over one another, and finally find resolve.

I was beaming while watching many of the scenes in A Praire Home Companion, much the same way I did with Cookie's Fortune, particularly the brilliant scenes seamlessly played between Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, with a bit of accent from Lindsay Lohan. This time it wasn't a sweet southern accent, but a flat, jerky Minnesotan-speak that permeated the vocals of the cast. True to Altman form, it was a quirky bunch of mis-matched personalities huddled together in a local country theater that, like the folks from Cookie's, deal with complex things in a simple, unpretentious manner. An old man dies and a young star is born on stage, and the characters know the significance of each event. They are not composed. We see them move and and turn with tears and simple human spirit, framed tenderly and gracefully by a camera that tells everything they're feeling by the movement of the lines on their faces.

Sunday, June 4, 2006

Alphaville - 1965 - DVD

Saturday, June 3, 2006

I picked up Godard's Alphaville (the first in a string of DVD rentals meant to acquaint me with some film-school-required features that I never saw when I was enrolled as a student) and I found the story's apprehension towards technology relevant to today's time.

The first shot is a blinking traffic light. Immediately we know this film has something to do with technology and how it manipulates written and spoken communication. The traffic signal is shot in extreme close-up, completely removed from exterior images that would provide meaning for the light's message. It may be telling us stop, or go, or caution, but the only definition to concretely derive is that this technology stands as a meaning for something else; seen alone as it is the light signifies the technology itself.

The film is filled with intermittent shots of signals and blinking lights like these as it follows the story of an investigator among the barcoded populace in the town of Alphaville. The film is concerned with the degradation of the written and spoken word and envisions a future where tenderness and tears are devoid in personal communication. The characters only have memories of love and feeling, and think within the parameters of mathematical axioms. They are drones in a society run by a handful of corporate conglomerates. The scenery and the characters' robotic manner of speech and gesture looks to me like a prelude to such films as THX-1138 (1971) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Alphaville's anxiety about the integration of technology with humanity is still relevant today in a time where interpersonal face-to-face meeting or written words are overshadowed by faceless media like the internet and wireless communication.

The score also struck me as reminiscent of American B-grade suspense films from the war and post-war era, and for a moment I thought it could have been lifted directly from such a film. It is, however, composed by Paul Misraki, who has quite a list of credits to his name.

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