IFFBoston: LOL

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How could anyone in our generation not go to see a movie called LOL? If you can, try to see it at IFFBoston Sunday, the last screening of the film. So far it’s the best I’ve seen. It’s an entirely improvised film about relationships–between people, and between people and social technologies–that was made for $3000. That means lots of IM, email, cell phones, etc. The film has little plot other than following the development or degeneration of a few friends and their relationships, and how technology is an integral part of that, both bringing them together and keeping them apart. You might say that the organizing device in the film is a musical project one of the characters is putting together–making short videos of people making random noises with their mouths, which he then edits together to make music out of just their sounds. Watching the film I felt it had a very Andrew Bujalski feel, and then *poof* one of these video heads making noises is Bujalski. Turns out the filmmakers, who live in Chicago, sent out a bunch of emails to people asking for videos of themselves making noises, and Bujalksi sent one in. So did several other indie filmmakers. It’s like a who’s who of indie festival darlings. At the screenings they are giving out free copies of the soundtrack as well, which was actually made by the actor in the film, who is in fact the musician he is playing in the film. So as you can see, like Bujalski, the filmmakers keep their characters close to the actors’ actual performances, which makes for excellent performances, because there’s not much performance going on at all.

Today I’m off to see In Between Days and Guatemalan Handshake, more soon…

A Plea To Filmmakers:

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Please stop with the excessively shaky camerawork. It’s unnecessary and vomit-inducing. Please learn to handle your camera more carefully. I’d like to tell you what I thought of Chalk, which I tried to watch at IFFBoston tonight, but I had to leave after about a half hour for fear of vomiting. And I was so nauseous I couldn’t go to any other screenings either. So please stop torturing your audience. Thanks.

IFFBoston Opening Night: Half Nelson

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Let’s get this out of the way first: Ryan Gosling is sexy. Sexy in that smooooth, cocky, I – know – he’s – working – me – but – it’s – so – much – fun – falling – under – his – spell kind of way, the way we girls kick ourselves afterward for being attracted to. I kicked myself for it while watching the movie, in fact. It’s all in the way they look at you. A guy who’s not afraid to look you dead in the eye, and hold your gaze, subtly predatory yet at the same time slightly elusive, luring you in rather than pouncing. It is even literalized in his body movement in one scene where he’s talking to a girl while peeking from around the corner.

That’s the main impression I came away with after watching Half Nelson, anyway. It’s not really the point of the film, and in fact I wonder if it might have detracted a bit from the film, which is about a drug-addicted high school teacher and the friendship he strikes up with one of his students who discovers his secret. After awhile his shtick got a little annoying, and felt instead like he was hamming it up for the camera. But it is also all a part of the inappropriateness of his character–his highly sexually-charged persona, like his drug addiction, is something we don’t expect, nor want to think about, in our teachers. In fact, thinking of them having personal lives at all usually brings a grimace to the face of any high school student. Maybe college too. The Village Voice says the film “pays fond tribute to, even as it slyly subverts, the inspirational classroom fable,” and I suppose that’s true, though a film that plays with genre conventions really only accomplishes a stretching of those conventions–it doesn’t ever break them. The genre just folds them in and they become new conventions. Overall it’s a strange beast–an “edgier” Lean On Me, where the teacher is as flawed as his students and no one is really saved in the end. In the obligatory inspirational teacher’s speech near the end, he preaches against Western black-and-white values that refuse to acknowledge that a tree can be “both crooked AND straight, a person both right AND wrong…” making sure you get the point the filmmakers are trying to get across.

But Gosling’s performance is the real reason to see this movie–there are shades of greatness, and once he learns to control the hamminess I think he’ll be one of the truly great actors of his generation. Newcomer Shareeka Epps likewise delivers a wonderfully subtle performance–so subtle that I thought it might just be the effect of shyness or nervousness in a young, new actor, but when I saw her gregariousness at the Q&A afterward I realized that was some serious acting going on there.

Tonight it’s more of the same themes as I’m off to see the public high school satire Chalk and then the morally-ambiguous drug-addict drama Cocaine Angel. More soon…

IFFBoston Opening Night Tonight

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You’ve probably seen the posters all over town. I’ll be covering opening night tonight, where they’re screening Sundance fave Half Nelson, and hopefully will see a lot of people I haven’t seen in a long time. The festival is looking good this year, and they expanded it to six days to accomodate the demand. Last year pretty much every show was sold out, and some are already sold out this year. More soon…

My Herzog Thesis Now Available

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I finally got around to shaping it up and posting it here. Werner Herzog and the Documentary Film. I was such a precocious little bitch.

Jesus Came to Pick a Fight

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An actual ad taken out by an actual church in an actual Texas online magazine:

via Duff:

“Sometimes I have trouble explaining Lubbock to people who don’t live here. I worry sometimes that I’m too harsh, that I may be giving people the wrong impression with descriptions that sound like simplistic hyperbole.

Sure, I can tell you we’re 80% Republican with a church on every corner, but what does that mean? How does that feel? What kind of people would build a society like that?

My local friends chide me for being too harsh, but now I have proof. I just ran an ad for Friday’s paper that will show you the truth of Lubbock, condensed into one beautiful, perfect image.

Sure, I could show you the stadium, the sports events, and the Buddy Holly statue, but that won’t show you what Lubbock is. It won’t show you how Lubbock feels.

This will.”

My New Emo Look

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IFFBoston Coverage Coming Soon

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The festival is next week, April 19-24, and I’ll be blogging it again this year…stay tuned…

Anti-Bush Elegance

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“I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration. And I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and grace to be ashamed of yourself.” – Harry Taylor to President Bush

via tony

You Get No Special Points For Honesty

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That is a theme I am dealing with lately and then I came across this quote from Caveh Zahedi:

“I had hoped that being completely honest would bring us closer together. But I had seriously miscalculated.”

Israeli Porn

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It just so happens that I was wondering a few days ago what porn would be like in Israel. Now Nerve.com’s film issue has an article that tells us! Thanks nerve. It turns out, Middle Eastern politics even reach into porn.

“Both men are frustrated with their country’s increasingly corrupt central government and want to make a statement. So today, in this nondescript room at the Sheraton, the peach taffeta curtains are tightly drawn. Turkish coffees and oily boxes of burekas, a popular Middle Eastern pastry, are scattered among containers of wet wipes and lube. …Their film is called The Wet Party. … to gain entry into the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the fictional Wet party bribes fellow politicians with sex instead of cash. Their platform includes a pledge: if elected to power, they’ll allow women to divert a portion of their paycheck toward breast-enhancement surgery, sort of like a 401k.”

Yoga Is Evil!

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According to Christians. This article is unintentionally hilarious:

“Once in the class, I scanned the room, curious as to what type of people take yoga. The class was comprised of an unlikely bunch: hefty, construction crew-type men, white-haired grandmas, and people such as me, wearing Nikes and t-shirts. I didn’t spot any lime-green hair, or a single pierced nose.”

Also Norwegian prison guards find a sinister side effect to yoga.

It Ain�t Me, Babe

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I’ve finally stopped playing Sam Cooke’s “That’s Where It’s At” constantly, and have found a replacement. This Dylan song always gets me. I had forgotten about it until I watched Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon cover it in Walk the Line. Now I’ve downloaded several versions from iTunes and can’t get it out of my head:

Go ‘way from my window,
Leave at your own chosen speed.
I’m not the one you want, babe,
I’m not the one you need.
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Never weak but always strong,
To protect you an’ defend you
Whether you are right or wrong,
Someone to open each and every door,
But it ain’t me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe,
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.

Go lightly from the ledge, babe,
Go lightly on the ground.
I’m not the one you want, babe,
I will only let you down.
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Who will promise never to part,
Someone to close his eyes for you,
Someone to close his heart,
Someone who will die for you an’ more,
But it ain’t me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe,
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.

Go melt back into the night, babe,
Everything inside is made of stone.
There’s nothing in here moving
An’ anyway I’m not alone.
You say you’re looking for someone
Who’ll pick you up each time you fall,
To gather flowers constantly
An’ to come each time you call,
A lover for your life an’ nothing more,
But it ain’t me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe,
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.

The original Dylan version is best, but the Johnny Cash-June Carter version is great for the humor factor. Johnny was clearly loaded and slurring his words when he dragged her out onstage to sing with him.

How To Cope With Depression

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Cartoon here.

More on the Scariest Movie EVER (with spoilers)

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More than a week after watching Pulse (Kairo), I am now finally able to sleep with the lights off again. And perhaps write a little about it. I have never in my life been so disturbed by a movie. And I like scary movies. But this one was different. In American horror films you can expect that the ghost is always caught or saved or figured out in the end. Solve their murder and they’ll leave you alone, etc. This brings some sense of closure. You watch these movies knowing you’ll walk away having a handle on it. Even if, like in The Ring, (to which this movie is compared) there is the suggestion that the ghost isn’t actually gotten rid of, that is usually perceived more as just a marketing ploy to let us know there’s going to be a sequel. We don’t actually walk out scared that that little girl is gonna come get us. Or at least I didn’t. (Spoilers ahead)

But this movie is Japanese and didn’t have this closure. In fact once it’s figured out what is the deal with these horrifying spectres, it just gets worse and more horrifying. Partly because the explanation we are given makes no sense. This is basically just faulty storytelling, but in the context of the film it doesn’t matter. In fact it makes it scarier, because the unknown is always scarier than the explained. Every scary movie ceases to be scary once its mystery is explained. So the fact that the “explanation” we get makes no sense keeps it unknown and myserious. To add to this, the problem is not “solved” in the end–in fact the ghosts win. It is an apocalyptic ghost story with no sense of closure (unless you consider an existential apocalypse with all but two people on the planet dead and soon to die closure). So not only do we never quite understand these ghosts, but they win. When you walk out of the theater, they’re still out there. Creeping around in the corners of my bedroom and forcing me to keep the lights on while I sleep.

I can’t think of any American horror film that does this, but then I’m not really a conisseur of horror films. I just see a few of the big-name ones once in awhile, and they all definitely follow a certain formula that is completely overturned in this film. It is a total mindfuck. I’m curious to see the American remake now, to see if it makes the film conform to the typical commercial American horror genre standards. (UPDATE: I have been reminded of Blair Witch Project, which does in fact let the ghost win. But for some reason that movie didn’t scare me at all. Plus the ‘witch’ is contained to one specific area that you’d have to enter specifically in order to see her, so all we gotta do is avoid that area and we’re safe. In Pulse, the ghosts are everywhere, day and night, public places and private, whether you turn your computer on voluntarily or not.)

I should add that the film has its hokey moments, of course, like all horror films. There is a ridiculously inane conversation between one of the main characters and a grad student in computer science–her brilliant expert advice for his ghost-in-the-computer problem is to hit the print screen button. Or to “click it to bookmark it.” Was the writer of this screenplay unable to locate a single person who had the most basic computer knowledge to tell him how laughable that is? Apparently not.

Creepy Movie Update

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I have been sleeping with the light on for the past few days thanks to this damn movie. If you are at all sensitive to these kinds of things I suggest you DON’T SEE IT.

Road Trip: NYC

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Had a fabulous time and I am probably moving there this summer but this latest trip made me realize: I got no love for New York. There are poeps there that I love, but the city itself holds zero allure for me.

Hmm.

Creepiest Movie Ever

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I couldn’t even watch it all, had to turn it off after a half hour. Then I woke up at 3am and couldn’t get those creepy images out of my head. It may turn out to be a cheesy film (if I ever manage to watch the whole thing) but the first half hour has scared the shit out of me.

UPDATE: I have been sleeping with the light on thanks to this damn movie. If you are at all sensitive to this sort of thing I suggest you DON’T SEE IT.

Have Sex With Your iPod

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I know many of you are so in love with your iPods that you have been secretly wishing there were a way to have sex with them…voila!

via Duff

So much for writing only about film. And it’s not like I haven’t been seeing any. Capote, thumbs up. 2046, thumbs down.

Lamest Web Design Ever

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I’d like to support the FullFrame Documentary Film Festival but I have to say they have the lamest web design I have ever seen: http://www.fullframefest.org/evac/burning.html.

Total cheese. I am embarassed for them.