Body Double (1984)

“Body Double” (1984)

IMDb

blind eye

There are only a few themes which are more suited to cinema than to any other medium, or form of art. Of those themes, voyeurism is certainly the one that has been more explored, and thus has more solutions and experiences. That’s probably because it is seductive, and allows for so many different approaches (unlike for example space exploration). Also, voyeurism is marketable and can be made into quite different genres. And it is a terribly effective way to fold an audience onto a screen, because no matter who, or what is the voyeur in the film, we as spectators become voyeurs. So i suppose the fact that voyeurism suits cinema better than any other art form is a purely technical thing, related to very characteristics of the medium; but the fact that we are so fond of voyeurism is because we ourselves are voyeuristic by nature.

Because of all this, making something about being voyeur that is interesting and original can be something quite difficult. But de Palma tries. He tries hard, is clever enough to learn from every previous experience, and is bold enough to try new things once he achieves something with what he made. Unfairly, to me, he has the fame of copying masters, tackling their thing and making something close. I don’t think he does that, or ever did. He picks up concepts others (usually great directors) used, and performs those concepts with a totally renewed (and new!) vision (many times literally a new eye). Sometimes he outdoes the originals. This strategy produced one of the best films ever made on story construction and eye: Blow out, a transformation of Antonioni. Because that film was so successful in achieving what was intended, he moved on.

Here he tries Hitchcock. Not the guy from Rear Window, more the one who made Vertigo. There is a world, unknown to us, unknown to our surrogate in the film, the watcher. He builds a story, he understands the world, by looking at it. Just by looking at it, his involvement in the development of that world comes very late in the game, and is not that important. He has the detective’s eye. And the world he is supposed to find is placed so he can find it, even though neither him or us know that at the beginning. So here we get into the territory of noir, the placing of the elements of the world in such ways that we/him necessarily have to find them. Here the trigger to the interest of the character is sex, as it often is in straight voyeuristic stories.

So de Palma knows where he is going, he is experimenting on solid grounds. But he doesn’t pull this off, not here. Apart from the basic structure of what he intends to do, almost everything else plays against the idea. His camera is not fluid, sensitive, snaky like it had been in Blow out or how it would become throughout the 90′. There are some cleverly conceived shots and sequences, but they are only worth on their own, without integration in a larger structure. Melanie Griffith won’t do it for me. I much rather prefer Karen Allen, specially when Brian was in love with her, that transpires into the movie. Griffith is wobbly, insecure. She is just adolescent, not with the Lolita fascination, just plain naive, and that sets her aside from the story. The soundtrack is terribly, one of the worst i’ve heard, worse than in many of the b movies that this one is stylistically close to.

My opinion: 2/5 if you know de Palma well enough you will appreciate the general concept here. But there are better places to go to see the ideas here flourish.

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Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

“Where the Wild Things Are” (2009)

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portals

Many critics, commentators, or simple serious film goers believe we live in a time of decadence, a decaying time when serious, groundbreaking, ambitious films are harder and harder to find. I disagree. It is possible that in no other time since film exists did we have so many intelligent and sensitive filmmakers working. Among several threads, usually built around cultural roots (the Mexican, the korean), we have a number of contemporary creators who collectively and individually created new solutions, innovated in lasting ways, while producing a highly personal and sincere kind of film. Jonze, Gondry, Kaufman (maybe we can extend this to Medem). I find “Malkovich” and “sunshine” two fundamental milestones of this kind of film. If you consider Medem, a couple more works should be considered fundamental.

What is it about? Links, connections, mind exploration, imagination rooted on how imagination works. Portals, transitions, muddy grounds for uneasy minds. This is essential post modern cinema stuff. As watchers, we become spectators of someone’s mind, visitors of that mind, many times, like here, literally visitors. This film invests that notion with the idea of the creation of a whole complete world (borrowed from a book), filled with perfectly defined characters, each a fraction of the whole self. Self reference. this, we have Jonze, who renews a certain lyric idea of cinema. Carter Burwell helps; a lot. Jonze does not press on the irony key, like Kaufman does, nor does he become cynical, like Gondry does. He is a lyrical, he invests all his creativity on the poetic envisioning of things, of the world itself, of how it unfolds. The structure in his films is perfectly revealed to us, and leaves no doubt. So we concentrate on the textures of the world, on how feelings ache, on how painful it is to be every fraction (character) of the world he proposes. Malkovich out did every thing, and created something unique. This is his next great thing.

Here, the collective effort of a single mind is visually invested in the creation of a structure, an architectural structure, the fort Max builds in his imagination. In how we watch that structure grow, we watch Max develop his imagined connections with his invented selfs. In a way, the structure, and the vision of that structure (the model) is a world within the world Max creates, and it becomes a character by itself. Landscapes: desert, forest, sea; set the needed moods.

This is a highly sensitive world, like the inside of a body, where everything you touch has the highest impact, like the inside of KW, where Max hides. It’s a world of doors, windows, connections. Sex.

My opinion: 4/5

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Avatar (2009)

“Avatar” (2009)

IMDb

expectations

Milestones in cinema can be fabricated products, tailored by huge, complex, and wide spread corporations, fighting for gaining attentions, and selling a product. So, now we have this Avatar, which has been announced as the next big thing, for several months, years perhaps. On those matters alone, that means this is a fabricated groundbreaking product, it is not Citizen Kane, nor even Jazz Singer. It probably is more of a Gone with the Wind.

But there is a film here. And it matters to watch it, beyond the package of marketing and brainless mass opposed opinions.

There are several evident strong things here. One is how Cameron outdid Zemeckis in achieving a certain realism that grows out of real people, abstracted into animation, only to be delivered to us again as realistic animated characters. That game Zemeckis played on Polar Express. This film tops what has been done so far. I don’t know whether this business of emulating reality through purely digital medium will have an interesting future, how much is there to explore with interest? But this is our high point so far.

Another thing is how this film cements what Peter Jackson had done with King Kong, and several action features have worked since: action films are spatial pieces nowadays. That is already and will become more a common place. It will look dated and wobbly any grand scale action/epic/war(?) film which won’t consider space occupation. That is where the 3d will take its place. On my few remarks on 3d cinema, i noted how its biggest possibilities are precisely in how the 3d enhances and creates the space, physical space, built with distances, where the action will happen. So, Pandora, the forest, is built to be spatially explored. Right from the beginning, on the waterfall, the battle to destroy the big tree, and pretty much all the action that takes place there. 3d is an interesting addition to what a concerned mind (or a group of minds) can do. I hope it becomes a usable tool for the beautiful author minds we have around the world (i wish Welles was here to use it).

Risks where brought down to a very minimum here. The story is just as cliché, recognizable, and thus acceptable as it could be without being shouting unbearable. Well, again it follows a Selznick logic of marketing products which are like what has been done and accepted by the audience, only bigger and better sold.

But surrounding this thin good-evil story, there are pieces of reflexivity, self aware or unintended, which make the process of post-reflection over the film delicious. The more visible one, and assumed, is how the film is to us as the avatar is to its owner. We dig into the reality of the film as the 3 avatar users dig into the reality of Pandora. Fake bodies, inner realities, as if moving down each level was the equivalent of climbing up the big tree. One unintended thing is when we consider the commentary in the film (social, ecological, moral) against the contradictions the film itself displays. It turns the wheel of bad guy good guy. At last, it assumes the “american general” as the sadist destruction oriented bad guy, perpetrating the same kind of terrorist crimes he was once commissioned to pursue. But than, the tools the film uses to achieve the desired happy ending, which respects the “alternative” of the native culture are exactly the tools the overthrown terrorists were using. The film itself is a story of good-evil, not a vessel for layered knowledge, like a tree of souls which uploads the lives of every past human being.

take it for the visual experience. It’s not groundbreaking but it is the current status of the best tools we have these days, to explore the emerging worlds of digital animation and 3d cinema. Enjoy the self reference if you appreciate it, but don’t be driven away by the useless safe options.

My opinion: 3/5

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Hwal (2005)

“Hwal” (2005)

IMDb

shouting quietness

You decide where you should support yourself, while you surf across the vastness of films, and art, that you try. Kim Ki Duk is one of most dear ports i seek for shelter, these days. I thought Bin Jip was transcendental in several ways. It was a sketch of love, a beautiful idea of seeing without looking, feeling without touching. It allows us to experiment in our minds, to subtract the noise of ordinary emotional pornography, and lift us to a different world. My personal experimentation of both Bin-Jip and this one was enhanced by the fact that it was a shared experience, with someone very important (bin-jip was even suggested by her).

I suppose this may be a personal question, but to me Bin Jip, having much to do with this film, tops it in every respect. And it shouldn’t. I mean, this one is, in its core, much closer to what it talks about. It should be a step further, regarding the other one. Isolation, the old man and the girl completely separated while sharing the same boat, the same life, the same room! The old man doesn’t touch the girl, but bathes her every night. The disturbances that overcome the quietness of the see. Metaphors, The bow, the rope. This is built out of oppositions, or better still, contradictions. But the outcome works similar to Bin-jip. The couple consummate their love when the old man disappears. The same philosophy of not touching, here achieved through a more spectacular scene, where sex is consummated, after the old man leaves to the sea.

So, this is a safe port, a beautiful journey, and if you expect nothing of it, you will get many good things. Compared to Bin Jip this is even more depurated, and all the imagery is more worked our and developed. So it works out the visual complaints i had with bin-jip. But it is less subtle, less developed, and thus, less challenging.

My opinion: 4/5

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Moon (2009)

“Moon” (2009)

IMDb

mind drilling

I’m convinced that no genre is more connected to the reality of our lives than science fiction. The levels of visual and contextual abstraction demanded by the genre are so high that you can only do good science fiction if you root its essence on what we are, outside the life of the film. You take out the comfort of recognizing places (most of the times), of understanding moods, contexts, ways to live. But you’re still left with people, or beings that stand for people (planet of apes) or better still, moodiness, and context that suggest people’s state of being. That’s our link, that’s our portal to any interesting sci fi built world. Méliès. 2001. Blade Runner. Now this. It is a great addition to the filmography of 2009, and eventually the greatest achievement in sci fi of this finishing decade.

This is a sort of 2001 meets Blade Runner, two threads of science fiction which i hadn’t seen mixed ever, and doubted it could be done. It’s better than that. It doesn’t mix. It just makes you believe it mixes. The film deceives you all the way, puts you in the same sort of unawareness Sam Bell is supposed to feel. So the film is what it is telling.

1 – This is where we start; Minimalistic, 2001 based imagery of the space. Open spaces, emptiness, isolation, meditation. That’s the starting ground. the man and the machine (Sam and GERTY). We’re led into believing we’ll watch the battle for control, who wins, who’s in charge? who deceives who?. What is the machine hiding, Is it hiding anything? The power over narrative control of the story, that’s what it is.

2 – But than, we’re included Sam’s doubles in the story. True or false? are We being deceived? Are the doubles real or a product of Sam’s imagination? Is any of what we see any real depiction of what’s going on, or are we left already into the delusional imagination of a homesick isolated man?

(spoilers here)
3 – the unfolding of the previous point. Yes, the doubles are real, physically real, at least everything indicates so. So, if every clone is Sam Bell, if every clone has the same past, who is Sam Bell? Who is any of those human beings, who can share among them the same emotions, the same feelings, the same remembrances. Here it invades completely Dick/Blade Runner territory. replicants. here we have the reversed story of Blade Runner, the world according to the replicants. Not a dubious depiction of whether Harrison Ford was a replicant himself, instead a hard exploration of what being one means. Invented memory, stuffed emotions. And all that those things mean to us, as human beings.

All the visual work has a coherence to what is being told. There is not a visual reference that outdoes the others, and that’s actually a good thing. We may have a great new filmmaker here. We certainly have a worthy film here.

My opinion: 4/5

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Hard Times (1975)

“Hard Times” (1975)

IMDb

what was so hard about it?

This is quite an uninteresting depiction of a fascinating time and context, the depression in the USA. It’s a fully cinematic theme, several things allow that. It has been vastly worked put in films, so it is part of a certain niche of cinematic memory, there a couple of favorite all time classics that exist during the depression (untouchables, purple rose…). So there is a visual picturization of the time, that matters to how people will respond to any film. Also, it is a fully dramatic time, because all the potential characters are ordinary people, covered with extra amounts of difficulties, poverty, lack of opportunities, a living hell. They overcome those difficulties, fight against the mud of desperation, and fight their way into a better life. Conflict, resolution, battles… this is the food to drama. And you can fill anything in that vessel: romance, heroism, sports, fantasy (woody again).

So, the very description of what i think makes depression based films interesting, by a general principle, puts this specific film away from interest. I mean, what was so hard about anything that we see? The guy is strong, he can hit anyone, all the shy shameful attempts to take his superiority outside the ring fail… OK he doesn’t get the girl, but than again, in the very perspective of Bronson, she’s just a girl, he prefers alone. He has a friend, and their friendship is challenged, but easily saved. So, in the end he gets a few punches, a lot of money, and after all the mud of depression is an easy land of opportunities, an el dorado for any Spanish conqueror.

What failed is that they centered the thing around the supposed toughness of Bronson on screen. The hard working, hard boiled guy, an American hero, John Wayne updated to the 70′. Well, it doesn’t work because he is not an interesting guy, at least he wasn’t properly pictured here, and the production didn’t help. Hey, even Rocky is more charming and convincing!

My opinion: 1/5

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Black Rain (1989)

“Black Rain” (1989)

IMDb

(en)vision, and prejudice

There are several things here, that make this a not so interesting film, but yet one that underlines characteristic features of the time it was made, and some of the participants that are in it:

.80’s action: i’ve been watching a good dose of the so called “action films” from the 80’s. I grew up with them, my first model of what action meant was deriving between the hard heroes films (siegel, stallone, van damme, schwarzenegger) and the fantasy adventures of the Spielberg streak (which includes Zemeckis). Rewatching them, i sometimes have to redefine what action means. Mostly because in many of them, we have a couple of actual physical action, and a huge dose of funny dialogues. So, in the 80’s, action and comedy are a suitable mix. Not so much here, of course, but this is still a sub product of the influences audiences were still accepting in those days.

.following the above, it is fundamental to notice how everything is bent to the vision of Ridley Scott. The man is great and envisioning things, at the largest scale the film allows, taking care of the bigger arc that every film should have. Even today, no one working now does this better than him. Here i think he tried to embed the film in a Blade Runner driven decadence. Of course it’s another context, and definitely another script! But watch how every shot is carefully frame, not to be worth (only) on its own as, say, Bertolucci might do. Every sequence is chained to all the others. That’s the big form. That’s the best in this film.

.Douglas is not particularly interesting as an actor, but he is a character in real life, and eventually he could sometimes pass that to his film characters. Garcia’s over the top terrible performance (partially compensated by Scott, who doesn’t allow actors to look so bad) highlights the Douglas’ character, on screen. Well, it’s a limited pleasure to watch, but it goes with what is intended.

.Hollywood, and how their perspective over ethnic or cultural groups outside the American mainstream: i’m glad that, at least to me, this film sounds terribly racist and absolutely uninterested in moving any bit away from common clichés. At least this means that i have moved forward and frankly, i think this is no longer done today. We have other clichés, other preconceptions, which probably i’ll be detecting 20 years from now. But what we have here is sad. So, the bad guys are the Japanese, those from the Yakuza are plain evil, the other well intentioned guys are plain incompetent. So the 2 American buddies have to go there, break every Japanese convention, and show them how to be fair and just. That’s it right? “It’s just a film”, some will say, It reflects dark corners of human stupidity, says i.

My opinion: 3/5

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Rodrigo Leão, Coliseu do Porto, November 28th 2009

Those who regularly read what i go on writing here knows that it’s very rare when i write something which is no a direct commentary on films i watch and that when i get out of that formula i’ve been using for the last 2 and a half years, i usually comment on the very life of the blog, editorial anotations of statistics, or small notes to facts i care about. The thing is, just a few hours ago, i watched a concert, leaded by Rodrigo Leão, one of the composers and musicians i care more about, at the present moment. An i decided to write about the concert, because RL’s music is all about cinema. I once wrote, and i underline it now, that despite his previous experiences as a composor for shors/tvshows/documentaries, he still is, up to this moment, the best film composer we Don’t have. Several elements i care about:

1 – mood – generally speaking, music has the capacity to establish (and hold) a certain environment, even if that’s not the intention of who made it. In cinema, the greatest merit a composer may have is to be able to determine that mood: humour, tension, curiosity – that extends to the notion of suspense. Simple to explain, but it’s quite complex to define all the subtleties of what is intented to went through to the audience. Than, there’s the need to hold that mood. This means that the music needs character, and than it needs to explored well enough to hold that character. Now, as far as i can tell, RL starts the conception of every piece of his music with the mood he intends to it. Preceeded or not by the existence of lyrics, it seems to me that the development of the piece follows the idea of that intended mood (or found mood). In a set like the room where i watched the concert, that’s what we get, that’s where we get in, in that specific enviroment, with different tones and shades. We don’t have the visual strength of the images, but we have the music happening in front of us. RL is a master in this environmental definition, and so it would be specially interesting to see him produce consistently to cinema, associated with directors who understand where the music fits in the film.

2 – class – there is a certain idea of perenity, even eternity, that passes through certain art. It seems to me that what is classic is what is built according to a certain set of rules which we know will work, in any context, time or kind of art. We can appeal to them, because its use gives us the freedom to freely explore practicaly everything we want. It’s an interesting paradox, the aplication of classic rules gives us freedom, as much as the intention to break them forces us to create a similar number of rules, so the work won’t fall apart. Nothing requires as many rules as irregularity. In any case, RL is someone who, being highly experimental in his exploration of moods, looks for classic constructions, in shape, and harmony. At the same time, it seems to me that he is fundamentally an intuitive composer, and therefore original, and this means he does what he feels to be needed, not what has been tested and proved right. So, after all, class is necessarily timeless and inovative. Paradox?

3 – comunity – eventually, in cinema or in concert, music may, and many times is, a factor of aggregation. In this concert i watched (actually my first RL), what he does is establish a mood, and invite us to participate. There’s the joy of the comunion of certain values which, though not explained, are understood by everybody. It’s not as strong and spontaneous as say, participate in the demolition of the Berlin wall. It’s an induced sensation, at the end of the concert we’ll all be as friendly or hateful as we were before (or maybe not), but all art is manipulation. And cinema, like Rodrigo Leão’s music, gives us the sensation that we are part of a group, that of the people who share the pleasure of listening, and seduces to see the images that motivate the music. We need all the films that were Not soundtracked by him.

The Spine (2009)

“The Spine” (2009)

IMDb

Cinanima2009

on the edge

It takes breathing, it takes reflection, to assume and finally understand that a film as this is a part of you. You see, short films that are as effective and powerful as this one are necessarily hard punches in the stomach. And indeed this is a powerful film. So in this case, it took me 10 days, during which i watched very few movies, to see which parts of me were shaken by the film. And indeed, i had 10 uneasy challenging days.

I didn’t know the filmmaker, this is my first experience with his work. I’ll want to see what he did before. This film does something that i hadn’t seen done this way before. Now that i saw it, it seems incomprehensible how it hadn’t been tried before. This is a kind of Philip Dick meets Gondry meets Jonze, both of which share the fact of having worked with Kaufman. Animation, in the sensitive way Landreth works, seems an incredibly interesting medium to work with these themes, basically voyages between vessels of inconscience. A constant instability that won’t allow us to know where we stand, which level of consciousness are we visiting. The whole film is a no man land, an uncharted territory to obscure parts of self.

Every emotion is perfectly controlled, the construction is tight and perfectly balanced, and played around poles of madness, depression, love, frustration. Life.

The visual accomplishment is huge. The camera is grounded on our real world, but the images, though springing from this same world, were visualized elsewhere, in the tiny space between being awaken, and deeply sleeping. I’ll want to see this film again.

My opinion: 4/5

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Red-end and the Seemingly Symbiotic Society (2009)

“Red-end and the Seemingly Symbiotic Society” (2009)

O filme no FestivalFocus
O filme no sítio da produtora

Cinanima2009

space builders

What an interesting film, in the right moment. After a very rich festival, interesting, with which i’m still dealing right now, i have several high points to remember. This film is, of all the experiences i’v had, one of the strongest, more fascinating, and which interests me the most, for my personal interest in studying the relations between space and the exploration of that space through visual media. This film is one of the best recent experiences i’ve seen in film which approaches so directly the theme. On those matters alone, it already deserves to get into a special list, that i’m making, of films that matter to my mental construction of the theme space and cinema.

But the interest of the film goes beyond that. Let’s see what it’s about. There’s a story. That story has to do with the advantages of difference, in a world where everything is black, the difference the red one can make. Ordinary, so far. Than, there is the idea of a cycle, which transpires into the whole narrative. The Lavoisier idea that everything becomes other things, and everything inevitably disapears. This is better stuff, because the film visually supports the text it chooses. All this is reasonably interesting, but it doesn’t take my breath away, or makes me dream beyond normality.

But than there’s something that yes, fascinates me, and yes, it is made in an exemplary, nearly perfect way. It is incorporated in the story, and it is absolutely supported and compensated by what we see. The story has to do with beings who build the space they inhabit, use, develop. We see the construction. The film starts inside spaces, supposedly natural, but already interesting, where the insects pick up the cubes which will become the pieces that will mold the spaces later used for experimentation. We get to see the picking up of the pieces, we get to see the transportation and, more important, we get to see the actual construction of each space, until the last piece. Finally, after this, we see those spaces, which do not exist only in the abstract world of the story, they are really built, so the camera can photograph them. Now, check this: even though there is digital support in the post-production of this film, it is mainly a stop motion. This means that not only the insects are real objects photographed, but also that every space we see is actually a built model, conceived to be photographed. This means that when we see insects building space, it’s like a folding of the constructive characteristics of the sets, it’s as if we were actually watching the working process of the film. The story of the film is the story In the filme. Subtle, well done, and architectural!

Some of the spaces are well conceived, for the pretended effect. The initial caves, the dome built with (sugar?) cubes and a space built with perfurated plaques. About this last space, which actually i thought was the most interesting and complex, and probably more adequate to be explored by the camera, i missed a bigger investment in its lighting, a more careful ilumination of the shots made there. The advantage (to me) of using those perfurated plaques is the possibility to create environments through light difusion. But that would fight the general imagem of the film. The camera bets mostly on side travelings, to give unity to every shot, and the exploration of space has mostly to do with angles and pov. There’s nothing invented there, even because it’s quite hard to expand even more the glossary of possibilities Tarkovsky and Welles gave us. But we have a consistent work here. My major complaint is the fact that, towards the end, the film fully abdicates its spacial exploration to enhance the less interesting bits of the story.

My opinion: 5/5 it’s an experience, i’ll find out how the film acommodates in my head… that will tell me how the rating will evolve.