SCREENING LOG -6/14-6/20, 2004

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Baadasssss! (2004, Mario van Peebles)

A son pays tribute to his father by turning the story of how Dad jump-started the blaxpolitation movement into the stuff of indie filmmaking legend. In doing so the film seems less focused on capturing the period or assessing the signficance of the father's work than on converting both into a moving success story to rally maverick filmmakers (white as well as black) in the present day. Son plays the father with love and fire. The film blends routine fictionalized interview footage and didactic dialogue with garishly saturated digital cinematography and whiplash editing, resulting in a wild, fascinating vibe. The story is formulaic perils-of-filmmaking fare but it builds to a climax that rings with conviction. yes (#19 among new films seen this year between SCHOOL OF ROCK and A GOOD LAWYER'S WIFE)

Blue Collar (1978, Paul Schrader)

Stomping blues soundtrack puts one in the mood for three down and dirty auto workers who are mad as hell and not taking it from their corrupt union bosses no more. A haphazardly planned heist of the local union office leads to a couple hundred bucks, a lot of cussing, and a ledger filled with shady transactions. I've never thought of the director, a consummate screenwriter, as being exceptionally good with actors or atmosphere, but he achieves great chemistry among his three leads and, helped by a crackling script full of memorable moments, makes the quotidian life on the assembly line into something worth caring about. yes (#8 for its year between THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN and MAN OF MARBLE)

Coffee and Cigarettes (2004, Jim Jarmusch)

17 years of vignette encounters between famous and not-so-famous celebrities from all walks of life (screen, stage, music); the results are expectedly a mixed bag of eccentrics feeling each other out and sizing each other up and down (one has two versions of Cate Blanchett having it out with each other) due to the mix of stimulants inferred by the title as well as the confrontational ambience of tiny cafe tables that fill the camera's frame. Feeling strangely too loose and too forced at once, the results are interesting but not enough for me to consider a qualified success. mixed

King Sized Canary (1947, Tex Avery)

A 7 minute short about a cat, a mouse, a bird, a dog, and a bottle of mega-growth potion upon which rests the delicate balance of power among them. Who would have guessed that a cartoon made at the birth of the Cold War would be a key cinematic statement on the arms race, 17 years ahead of DR. STRANGELOVE? Seen in this light, the final image of cat and mouse sitting side by side as overstuffed equals practically big enough to crush the world gains remarkable poignancy. YES (#3 for its year between THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI and THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR)

The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946, Robert Clampett)

A tribute to the Dick Tracy comic books and comic book love in general, a duck's obsession with Tracy leads him into a phantasmagorical daydream populated with punning parodies of Tracy characters such as Noodlenose, Hammerhead, etc. Phantasmagorical daydreams seem to be the signature of the director who helmed this one; he seems more in touch with his id anxiety closet than his more famous peers. yes

The Big Snooze (1946, Robert Clampett)

Elmer Fudd gets fed up with being Bugs Bunny's constant foil, and tears up his contract to the Brothers Warner (which, I later learned, has autobiographical resonance with the uncredited director; this, his last film with Warner Brothers). Bugs, realizing that his own celebrity is contingent on his partner's perpetual humiliation, interlopes on the now-retired Elmer's lakeside daydream and splashes it with buckets of Nightmare Paint -- The result is perhaps the most unhinged phantasmagoria in the director's career; what it lacks in narrative continuity (which was rarely ever the director's concern to begin with), it more than makes up for in a series of psychologically loaded visuals: Elmer is stripped to his skivvies, abused in different ways by thousands of Bugs clones and turned into a voluptuous woman pursued by ravenous wolves. Perhaps the quintessential statement on Elmer Fudd as the personified epitome of the haplessly bourgeois conventionalist mindset, the very normalcy the director, an obvious disciple of Bunuel, had consistently attacked in some of the most breathtaking ways in all of animation. YES (#4 for its year between IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and UTAMARO AND HIS FIVE WOMEN)

Red Hot Riding Hood (1943, Tex Avery)

The Little Red Riding Hood story gets told for the umpteenth Disneyfied time, but Red Riding Hood, the Wolf and Grandma are all sick to death of it -- and so they relocate to the Big Bad City where zoot-suiting Wolfie blows his stack over red-haired striptease Riding Hood, hooting and hollering through some of the most creative visualizations of male libido ever drawn. It's a whole lot of animated testosterone buildup that gets severely thwarted when he ends up at Grandma's pad; but even when Wolfie plunges to his fate, his howling sex drive lives on... and on... and on... YES (#4 for its year between THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP and THE LEOPARD MAN)

Kikujiro (1999, Takeshi Kitano)

Two-bit huckster escorts an orphan boy in search of his mother, while using him, abusing him, and subsequently consoling him (through the use and abuse of others along their journey). Of the directors' works (three of which I saw this week), I consider this his most visually inventive, popping with vibrant summer pastels; it is also probably the one that lends the most warmth and personal insight into his deadpan blend of pathos and cruelty, and the most convincing look to date at the sad vulnerability that lurks beneath the most famously hardened visage in contemporary Japanese (and Spike TV) culture. YES (#6 for its year between EYES WIDE SHUT and DARKNESS AND LIGHT)

Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (1971, Melvin van Peebles)

Sex-show performer becomes an unlikely cop-killing radical over the course of 97 minutes of rough-hewn, ragged but righteous filmmaking. There's a lot of stuff going on in this unwieldy, uncomfortable blend of B-movie entertainment and agit-prop, with jaw-dropping moments of pornography and violence that trangress conventional good taste, which, the movie seems to say, may be the only way to break through the lines that divide male from female, black from white; what's funny is that the film offers the viewer plenty of time to sort their thoughts out, as the finale consists of 20 minutes of the hero running for the border, as flashbacks, narrative cross-cuts and a haunting musical chorus have it out in his mental space, as well as ours. Sadly enough, the most conventional and depressing elements of this rich cinematic ur-text (which for me ranks up there with KILLER OF SHEEP among the true landmarks of 70s African American cinema) were the ones that went on to fuel the Blaxploitation genre, which now gets fashionably pillaged and referenced as harmless camp by Tarantino fans all over the world. yes (#2 for its year between MCCABE & MRS. MILLER and WALKABOUT)

Dolls (2002, Takeshi Kitano)

Man abandons his family and fiancee after his old girlfriend goes insane -- they wander the world connected by a red rope. A gangster reunites with the old flame who's waited to have lunch with him for several decades. An obsessed fan does what it takes to "see" his idolized pop singer, disfigured after an accident. No, this isn't Almodovar-ville; the director of these three interwoven stories of romantic loss and self-sacrifice achieves a near-static isolation of the melodramatc elements he's engaged with encreasingly throughout his forays throughout yakuza-land. The results are compelling, immaculately composed, and I'm not sure what else. It may take another viewing to fully digest this. yes

Desistfilm (1954, Stan Brakhage)

The Denver beatnik spirit circa 1954 captured in 7 minutes of fragments of young men and women singing, dancing, and making out in a cabin. Nothing exceptional save in the context of the filmmaker's oeuvre. mixed

Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959, Stan Brakhage)

Literally as well as figuratively dark, a disturbing, carnal look into the bonds of matrimony as man and woman embrace naked on a negative-inverted image, alternating with dim shots of glances of their faces. In a vague, intuitive way, this film visualizes the tense, funky horror of marital relations as well as any film I can think of. yes

Zatoichi (2003, Takeshi Kitano)

The director's return to full-scale commercial cinema, appropriating a beloved '60s serial and retelling it for maximum entertainment value, with masterfully choreographed swordfights decorated with CGI spurts of blood. For all its narrative momentum and efficiency, it sorely lacks the human insight and introspection of his other films; basically he's traded in Ozu for Yojimbo, and for me the result, while still engaging and masterfully assembled, is a net loss. The ending, juxtaposing the hero's Ethan Edwards-like isolation with the technicolor Riverdancing of the liberated village, seems tacked-on and insincere given how much we were prodded to enjoy the ample bloodshed that preceded it. yes

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