I Think I Need a New Heart?
Jun. 28th, 2005 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistLast week, after extensive arm-twisting insistence from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
totalvirility I went to see "Me and You and Everyone We Know." "You will love it," he raved. "Sometimes I just know you will love a movie and this is one of them." "How do you know?" I asked suspiciously. "We have very different taste in movies a lot of the time." "No, I know," he said. "Sometimes I love a movie but I know you will hate it. But other times I know you will like it. I knew you'd like "Mysterious Skin," didn't I?" "Well, that wasn't hard," I pointed out. "Considering that I have liked every film Gregg Araki ever made, inductive logic was on your side there."
But anyway, I was convinced. And...Vini, Vidi, Hated It.
I am not even going to get into all the reasons why I hated it (derivative posing as original, "heartwarming" posing as complex, self-congratulatory about how "quirky" it is), but this did prompt some soul-searching about what kind of films I like, and why my best friend, who has known me for ten years and watched countless films with me, who knows what pushes my affect buttons because he's seen me cry during numerous Buffy episodes and laugh over Fistingbot, got it so, so wrong. Oh wait, I have no soul. At least not that I want stirred. And I am content with my heart being The Iceberg That Sank The Titanic (after seeing which, incidentally, I sobbed unconsolably for at least 30 minutes, bleating "but it's so sa-a-a-a-d" into the London night air, and I believesaintpeg can attest to that). Don't want my heart "warmed," thankyouverymuch.
Then I had, like, a suspiphany--a brewing epiphany, already leaking light, but still in the "suspicion" gateway stages. When people suggest films to me, based on what movies I have vocally liked, they think that I go for "quirky," but they end up serving me a big, heaping plate of Red Herring, instead.
What were my favorite films? My mind kept helfpully offering the goriest selections it could conjure, presumably to wash the taste of the cloy out of my mouth wiht BLOOD. Scientifically, I consulted a previously submitted sample of "favorite films" by considering my "movies" selection on my Friendster (TM) profile.
What movies did I put on Friendster as my "favorites" to Represent my Identity in cyberspace?
"Burnt By the Sun"--an incredibly depressing, bleak film about people at their weakest and their worst, that is like a study of singed characters through the very lens that concentrates the sunlight that will burn. It's not "redemptive" in that wank-Catholic genre that apple-cheeked Roger Ebert loves and I hate (e.g. "Magnolia," "Legends of the Fall" (Macho Catholic Redundant Crossover Subgenre), 50% of films set in Boston and/or starring Sean Penn/Kevin Bacon and 95% of Hollywood biopics like "Ali," "Pollack" and other Prodigal Sons, with the exception of "Basquiat"). It is very beautiful in its inevitable trajectory, that is like an accident in slow-motion, with its logic that "no climate can outsmart."
"After Hours"--which is dark and weird and wonderful but does not require any emotional investment on the part of the viewer into the hapless protagonist, trapped in an Odyssey from hell through pre-Giuliani New York downtown. In fact, the film dictates that the viewer's only engagement with said protagonist can be described as "fascinated schaudenfreude."
"The Russian Ark"--which is basically the best cinematic "adaptation" of Benjamin's passage about the Angel of History from "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Now, the Angel of History is wicked cool, but hardly what we'd call heartwarming.
"Bound"--beautiful, stylized, Hot As Hell, and made up of meta-characters in the Project of Lesbian Noir that does the simulacrum homage aesthetic, of a pulp genre that was never mainstread in the iconic "retro time" it is set in. It's like a cinematic equivalent of Stanislaw Lem's "A Perfect Vacuum"--a collection of book reviews for unwritten books.
"Great Expectations"--beautiful stylized (notice a pattern?), but distanced from itself by the choppy, poor script and the ice at the core of the story, well-preserved, although perhaps through inadvertent means.
"The Royal Tenebaums" is--astheophile put it--a farce that never lapses out of genre (I may be slightly paraphrasing). I love "The Royal Tenenbaums" so much because it is the PRECISE OPPOSITE of those movies that get lauded as "edgy" and turn out to be, like, cotton candy in "Hot Topic" wrapping. It is a film that generated the discourse of "heart-warming and offbeat/loveable" around itself, and it is TOTALLY NOT. Everyone in that film is neurotic, awful, dysfunctional and cruel to each other in blaze drive-by fits. Structually, it masquerades as having a third-act "resolution" when the characters become "human" and Love Triumphs, but it's like one of those pictures where little things are wrong. Gwyneth Paltrow tells her stepbrother who is in love with her, "I guess we'll just have to be secretly in love with each other" and then she pseuo-incestuously kisses him and they watch an owl fly away? Um, WHAT? Royal himself is buried with a completely insane epitaph and essentially goes into the grave with a tombstone that says "pathological liar" and the "resolutions" are kind of like the "resolution" of a family "incident"/aftermath that happened one year at my uncle Boris' house when a young couple showed up to dinner, and was introduced as our new-found relatives from Tel-Aviv, and there were drunken sloppy toasts to welcome them into the family, and a particularly heartfelt "next year in Jerusalem!" and then I didn't see them again, or hear anything about them, at the next Thanksgiving, or the next Seder, or the next Thanksgiving, or the next Seder, and when I finally inquired, the response I got was "oh, it turned out they weren't really our relatives." And I never did get any elaboration on that, even though I Tried. And that's what "The Royal Tenenbaums" is like. And I love it. Because It's True.
"Me Without You"--which, I suppose, could be described by some as "warm" in the end, but that film, for me, was what "Eternal Sunshine" (which I appreciated, but which left me unaffected) was for my friends.
You know what? I went to see "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" on Sunday night withsaintpeg and RubikZube and I loved it, and not just because Brad and Angelina are on the top of my "fuckable celebrities" list. The film is a Blatant Metaphor that unfolds as such by design, rather than through ineptitude and absence from class the day Subtlety 101 was taught. The bougie suburban setting, and especially the mall at the end are as effectively used as the mall in the original "Dawn of the Dead." And I, with my I-will-take-what-I-can-get by way of Political Critique from Hollywood mindset, was pleased by the obvious "perfect suburban Americana at Home/home vs. Brutal murder outside the house/Abroad" policy metaphor. The film is a meta-event that captures exactly how America aestheticizes and airbrushes and sexy-fies its atrociousness in policy. Our Foreign Interventions are served to the public as Brad's pouty lips and Angelina's even poutier lips. They are so Sexxy we are happy to enter into commercial complicity to partake. The big joke of the movie is the "humanization" of these two atrocious murderers and the repressive desublimation the audience feels in identifying with them, wanting them to fuck, to patch it up, to live at the end. It's kind of like a Colonial text, but mimetically on purpose, designed to illuminate the process of production of these icons that we can't help but be transfixed with, as they, Larger Than Life, joke and banter, and the audience laughs, because that is Option A, and Option B (the Sanctioning option) is "aw, shucks, tsk-tsk." You can read the hyberbolic destruction of the Smiths' home, wreaked by them before they get with the hot-t-t fucking as a metaphor for the failure in communication between FBI/CIA or DoD/CIA resulting in clusterfucks like 9/11 or No Exit Strategy in Iraq (of course, I an LIHOP on the former and 100% Attuned to PNAC on the latter), or you can just read it as the structural collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions, but either way, it is an immensely enjoyable movie where you don't care about ANYONE. And Angelina could TOTALLY smear that little creepy French troll Amelie across the wall, like the synthetic Gusher that she is.
totalvirility I went to see "Me and You and Everyone We Know." "You will love it," he raved. "Sometimes I just know you will love a movie and this is one of them." "How do you know?" I asked suspiciously. "We have very different taste in movies a lot of the time." "No, I know," he said. "Sometimes I love a movie but I know you will hate it. But other times I know you will like it. I knew you'd like "Mysterious Skin," didn't I?" "Well, that wasn't hard," I pointed out. "Considering that I have liked every film Gregg Araki ever made, inductive logic was on your side there."But anyway, I was convinced. And...Vini, Vidi, Hated It.
I am not even going to get into all the reasons why I hated it (derivative posing as original, "heartwarming" posing as complex, self-congratulatory about how "quirky" it is), but this did prompt some soul-searching about what kind of films I like, and why my best friend, who has known me for ten years and watched countless films with me, who knows what pushes my affect buttons because he's seen me cry during numerous Buffy episodes and laugh over Fistingbot, got it so, so wrong. Oh wait, I have no soul. At least not that I want stirred. And I am content with my heart being The Iceberg That Sank The Titanic (after seeing which, incidentally, I sobbed unconsolably for at least 30 minutes, bleating "but it's so sa-a-a-a-d" into the London night air, and I believe
saintpeg can attest to that). Don't want my heart "warmed," thankyouverymuch. Then I had, like, a suspiphany--a brewing epiphany, already leaking light, but still in the "suspicion" gateway stages. When people suggest films to me, based on what movies I have vocally liked, they think that I go for "quirky," but they end up serving me a big, heaping plate of Red Herring, instead.
What were my favorite films? My mind kept helfpully offering the goriest selections it could conjure, presumably to wash the taste of the cloy out of my mouth wiht BLOOD. Scientifically, I consulted a previously submitted sample of "favorite films" by considering my "movies" selection on my Friendster (TM) profile.
What movies did I put on Friendster as my "favorites" to Represent my Identity in cyberspace?
"Burnt By the Sun"--an incredibly depressing, bleak film about people at their weakest and their worst, that is like a study of singed characters through the very lens that concentrates the sunlight that will burn. It's not "redemptive" in that wank-Catholic genre that apple-cheeked Roger Ebert loves and I hate (e.g. "Magnolia," "Legends of the Fall" (Macho Catholic Redundant Crossover Subgenre), 50% of films set in Boston and/or starring Sean Penn/Kevin Bacon and 95% of Hollywood biopics like "Ali," "Pollack" and other Prodigal Sons, with the exception of "Basquiat"). It is very beautiful in its inevitable trajectory, that is like an accident in slow-motion, with its logic that "no climate can outsmart."
"After Hours"--which is dark and weird and wonderful but does not require any emotional investment on the part of the viewer into the hapless protagonist, trapped in an Odyssey from hell through pre-Giuliani New York downtown. In fact, the film dictates that the viewer's only engagement with said protagonist can be described as "fascinated schaudenfreude."
"The Russian Ark"--which is basically the best cinematic "adaptation" of Benjamin's passage about the Angel of History from "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Now, the Angel of History is wicked cool, but hardly what we'd call heartwarming.
"Bound"--beautiful, stylized, Hot As Hell, and made up of meta-characters in the Project of Lesbian Noir that does the simulacrum homage aesthetic, of a pulp genre that was never mainstread in the iconic "retro time" it is set in. It's like a cinematic equivalent of Stanislaw Lem's "A Perfect Vacuum"--a collection of book reviews for unwritten books.
"Great Expectations"--beautiful stylized (notice a pattern?), but distanced from itself by the choppy, poor script and the ice at the core of the story, well-preserved, although perhaps through inadvertent means.
"The Royal Tenebaums" is--as
theophile put it--a farce that never lapses out of genre (I may be slightly paraphrasing). I love "The Royal Tenenbaums" so much because it is the PRECISE OPPOSITE of those movies that get lauded as "edgy" and turn out to be, like, cotton candy in "Hot Topic" wrapping. It is a film that generated the discourse of "heart-warming and offbeat/loveable" around itself, and it is TOTALLY NOT. Everyone in that film is neurotic, awful, dysfunctional and cruel to each other in blaze drive-by fits. Structually, it masquerades as having a third-act "resolution" when the characters become "human" and Love Triumphs, but it's like one of those pictures where little things are wrong. Gwyneth Paltrow tells her stepbrother who is in love with her, "I guess we'll just have to be secretly in love with each other" and then she pseuo-incestuously kisses him and they watch an owl fly away? Um, WHAT? Royal himself is buried with a completely insane epitaph and essentially goes into the grave with a tombstone that says "pathological liar" and the "resolutions" are kind of like the "resolution" of a family "incident"/aftermath that happened one year at my uncle Boris' house when a young couple showed up to dinner, and was introduced as our new-found relatives from Tel-Aviv, and there were drunken sloppy toasts to welcome them into the family, and a particularly heartfelt "next year in Jerusalem!" and then I didn't see them again, or hear anything about them, at the next Thanksgiving, or the next Seder, or the next Thanksgiving, or the next Seder, and when I finally inquired, the response I got was "oh, it turned out they weren't really our relatives." And I never did get any elaboration on that, even though I Tried. And that's what "The Royal Tenenbaums" is like. And I love it. Because It's True."Me Without You"--which, I suppose, could be described by some as "warm" in the end, but that film, for me, was what "Eternal Sunshine" (which I appreciated, but which left me unaffected) was for my friends.
You know what? I went to see "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" on Sunday night with
saintpeg and RubikZube and I loved it, and not just because Brad and Angelina are on the top of my "fuckable celebrities" list. The film is a Blatant Metaphor that unfolds as such by design, rather than through ineptitude and absence from class the day Subtlety 101 was taught. The bougie suburban setting, and especially the mall at the end are as effectively used as the mall in the original "Dawn of the Dead." And I, with my I-will-take-what-I-can-get by way of Political Critique from Hollywood mindset, was pleased by the obvious "perfect suburban Americana at Home/home vs. Brutal murder outside the house/Abroad" policy metaphor. The film is a meta-event that captures exactly how America aestheticizes and airbrushes and sexy-fies its atrociousness in policy. Our Foreign Interventions are served to the public as Brad's pouty lips and Angelina's even poutier lips. They are so Sexxy we are happy to enter into commercial complicity to partake. The big joke of the movie is the "humanization" of these two atrocious murderers and the repressive desublimation the audience feels in identifying with them, wanting them to fuck, to patch it up, to live at the end. It's kind of like a Colonial text, but mimetically on purpose, designed to illuminate the process of production of these icons that we can't help but be transfixed with, as they, Larger Than Life, joke and banter, and the audience laughs, because that is Option A, and Option B (the Sanctioning option) is "aw, shucks, tsk-tsk." You can read the hyberbolic destruction of the Smiths' home, wreaked by them before they get with the hot-t-t fucking as a metaphor for the failure in communication between FBI/CIA or DoD/CIA resulting in clusterfucks like 9/11 or No Exit Strategy in Iraq (of course, I an LIHOP on the former and 100% Attuned to PNAC on the latter), or you can just read it as the structural collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions, but either way, it is an immensely enjoyable movie where you don't care about ANYONE. And Angelina could TOTALLY smear that little creepy French troll Amelie across the wall, like the synthetic Gusher that she is.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
"I could go to a party, get drunk, talk to someone…who knows?"
Date: 2005-06-28 11:18 pm (UTC)Re: "I could go to a party, get drunk, talk to someone…who knows?"
Date: 2005-06-29 03:00 am (UTC)"Surrender, Dorothy!"
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 12:05 am (UTC)Have you heard any of the director's records? I think you would hate them, but you might find them at least challenging and interesting if not fun to listen to. She is a performance/spoken word artist who did an INSANE record about IQ testing and some of her older short films deal in a really creepy/fascinating way with technologies of measurement and psychological profiling.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 03:00 am (UTC)Why do you think I would hate it? I think I'd like to know that before I give them a listen.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 02:45 pm (UTC)I think she's fascinating. Anthrochica is wrong.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 02:49 pm (UTC)Also what IS is about that movie that you think is Solontz-like? We started talking about it but then the Solontz goldfish happened.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 01:37 am (UTC)Wow, I actually winced just seeing the title for the first time in ages.
Back in my list-making days a friend and I were making a list of Ten Truly Great Movies The Watching Of Which Is Much Like A Kick In The Stomach. (This was also in my pre-grammar-fascist days.) I think we came up with this one, Breaking The Waves, and La Haine before we got too depressed to continue.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 03:01 am (UTC)That's like me watching 7th Heaven as a Brecht play. It totally works, too.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 11:09 am (UTC)My Take on some of these films:
Amelie
love the suicidal goldfish
Magnolia
love the suicidal frogs (and the soundtrack)
Titanic
love the suicidal boat (loathe the movie)
Bound
kept looking for lesbian-inclined Chucky to wield phallic object at Gina Gershon and run off and into Toy Store Sunset with the Tilly chick
I sense a theme
Date: 2005-06-29 12:47 pm (UTC)Esp. love the idea of Titanic as a "suicidal boat"
While I like Aimee Mann a whole lot, I just refuse to say that there was anything positive about "Magnolia." That movie is like an iconic hyper-representation of everything I hate.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 01:42 am (UTC)That said, I didn't like The Royal Tenenbaums so very much either. I saw the same yanking of the audience's chain with regard to the incest, and I was just annoyed. Where you saw restraint and realism, I saw failure of nerve. These two people weren't even related! It wouldn't have been incest! It may just be that I've seen too many stories wend from pitch to production with this Schrodinger's cat problem, where x interesting idea has been proposed, but keeps freaking some people out, and so the attempt is made to play it as both x and not x - here, as both incest and not incest - and it just drives me to distraction. You want to do incest? Then do it. But this namby-pamby, now my foot's in the pool, now it's not stuff - god. WHY?
I don't know - I thought Rushmore was great. It was so cool and so controlled - and the characters were actually experiencing pain. Whereas, in both The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic, the characters themselves did this kind of, "now I'm in pain, now I don't care, now I'm in pain" thing I found frustrating. I found it telling that Anderson and Wilson said of TRT that they wanted to do a story about the suicidal son, but kept feeling the story move towards Royal. And, frankly, it felt like that to watch - it felt half baked, like a script shot mid-shift. A good script! Or, a point of shift between two great scripts! But the willingness to move towards shooting it before making those decisions...it's realism, but of a very self-regarding kind. Real World Realism. Project Greenlight Realism. At some point in TRT, one of the kids is with mom, watching Ben Stiller and his sons dragging their luggage into the house, and the kid - I think it's Paltrow - says, wounded, "How come he gets to move back in?" I LOVE that moment. There's so much awesome stuff that TRT brings up. But it doesn't do anything more than that - it's like all those simple crayon pictures of Paltrow on the wall - the movie excuses its infantilism by saying, "Oh, but this is a movie about infantilism." And I, as an audience, say, "that's a juvenile cheat." And the movie says back to me, "this is a movie about that kind of juvenile cheat." And I, the audience, say, "Oh, for chrissakes --"
I notice about myself - I react badly to overt emotional appeals, or emotional appeals that I find excessive. But I take only slightly less kindly to movies that want to swap out self-congratulatory cleverness for emotion.
God, what a cranky post. I'm such a bitch.