SCREENING LOG - 7/18-7/24/2005

Back to 2005 Index

Polyester (1981, John Waters)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082926
yes (#9 for 1981 between THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS and THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR)

Lady Musashino (1951, Kenji Mizoguchi)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043825
yes

Last Days (2005, Gus van Sant)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403217
yes (#9 for new films seen in 2005 between RIZE and NOBODY KNOWS)
Of all the people I've talked to who've seen it, I seem to have liked this movie the least, though I still admired much of it and was absorbed throughout. As with the other two entries in the newly-dubbed "Van Sant Youth Trilogy" (GERRY, ELEPHANT), one has to accept the ground rule that one should not expect any sort of explanation or causality to the fatal events depicted. And I can accept that so long as I have something else to get excited about, which didn't happen in GERRY and most certainly did in ELEPHANT, with the aquarium-like sense of a teenage microcosm, a swirling social order that pulsates with insecurity and contingency. With LAST DAYS, one can accept that there will be no psychoanalyzing of the Kurt Cobain figure, and we are left with the act of bearing witness to what his last living moments might have been like, and relate to it in purely physical, audio-visual terms.

On that level, the film offers a bounty of sensations and images, starting with the oddly sensual sight of Cobain (referred to in the film as "Blake" -- one of several possible nods made by the film to Jarmusch's DEAD MAN) walking through the forest in vermillion silk pajamas. For the most part Michael Pitt's performance, a purely physical, almost animalistic study of depressed human behavior, is riveting, incoherent mumbling notwithstanding. The sight of him crawling on all fours in a nightgown is eerily fascinating, as are the two moments where you actually see him performing (the "Death to Birth" song, written by Pitt, is his closest moment to reviving the Ghost of Kurt). Sometimes the physicality devolves into slapstick that I found less inspired (Blake running away from people, making macaroni and cheese the hard way, or putting a box of cereal in the fridge).

The use of sound in this film is simply amazing, so rich in texture, with a creepy, oppressive quality in the same way Todd Haynes achieved in SAFE. Sound turns out to be the only way we have to possibly enter the mindspace of Blake, to partake in his claustrophobia and psychic ruin. Van Sant tries more of the overlapping time stuff he borrowed from Bela Tarr, but the results aren't as expansive as they were in ELEPHANT. If anything, this technique, combined with Harris Savides' lush, blank stare cinematography, underscores a certain compulsive, fetishistic quality towards time, space and people that Van Sant has developed over the past few years, a fetishism that I find a tad gratuitous if not airless. Not only does it confirm that Van Sant doesn't have any explanations or insights into the causes of these events, but it also makes one feel he's being a bit too coy about his deliberate lack of answers. It's not that he has no right to be oblique (hell, Nirvana was one of the most lyrically oblique rock bands of all time) but that he is too fussy about his obliqueness, and so his movie feels a bit precious and artsified. It seems antithetical to the aggressive, robust spirit of Cobain's music -- the movie is more Pink Floyd than Nirvana. Pink Floyd is okay, but I do prefer Nirvana. And I prefer Lisandro Alonso's LOS MUERTOS and Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's TROPICAL MALADY, two other new films that do more with a cinema of mysterious events and unexplained behaviors.

The Motel (2005, Michael Kang)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436607
yes (#7 for new films seen in 2005 between KUNG FU HUSTLE and RIZE)

Shape of the Moon (2005, Leonard Retel Helmrich)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436794
YES (#2 for new films seen in 2005 between MICHELANGELO'S GAZE and MEMORIES OF MURDER)
I have almost no doubt that you would love SHAPE OF THE MOON. It's an amazing documentary that takes the neo-realist aesthetic to a rare level of immediacy and intensity, so much that it feels like fiction. It has a lot of fun making Indonesia into a visually dazzling landscape, while charting the breakup of a poor Christian family struggling against natural disasters, ruthless usurers and an overwhelming tide of Muslim evangelism. Basically this film deserves all the praise and hype that was showered on Michael Winterbottom's IN THIS WORLD a couple years ago -- it's much more raw and for that reason more convincing. Apparently it is the second entry in a documentary trilogy, which I eagerly hope to view in its entirety.

Back to 2005 Index