manic panic

still here.
still alive.
rocking out, unplugged.
officially dropped the rock because i don't need the title, i just do--already, rock that is.
loving, loving, loving.
convocation is on the 10th, finally it's my turn in the cap n' gown.
off to check out montreal in a week.
wish it was already july.
thinking about other people's babies.

posted by Dweezil @ 11:35 PM

updates coming.

here are some recently viewed titles to hold you over:

Night of the White Pants
Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist
Career Girls
High Hopes
All or Nothing
Videodrome
The Piano
Hiroshima, mon amour
Of Human Bondage
Grown Ups
Home Sweet Home
Secrets and Lies
Nuts in May
Benny's Video
Speaking Parts
Seventh Continent
Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
Blindness
...

posted by Dweezil @ 2:36 PM

Benny's Video
I’m always nervous with a Haneke rental. He is very good, but so disarming and horrific.
Benny’s Video was easier to get through than Funny Games, but it was still starkly intense and grim. Formally, absolutely brilliant though potentially frustrating for the average filmgoer.
Haneke really is a master of Horror in some sense. I like to think of the post-modern horror as putting the monster inside the I-Eye, these films are often about embodiment, alienation, and bodies in relation to economies and technologies, presenting something formally and narratively horrifying and horrific.
Certainly, Haneke isn’t showing his sense of humor here—he really saves that up for Funny Games. I mean really, the man did it TWICE, twisted yes. Humorless, no.
Of Note:
Last Night I tried to watch Just Buried but I turned it off half way.

Meantime
It’s Monday again, and we’ve begun this pattern of watching the Mike Leigh selection for the week, dad and me. Today was a tougher piece; Meantime. This was Leigh’s return to feature films after a decade of Play for Today TV films (Nuts in May, Grown Ups…). It’s bleaker than Bleak Moments. Gary Oldman is electric as Coxy, the skinhead and Tim Roth is brilliant as the slower Colin—a far cry from the un-blinkling Trevor of Made in Britain, however it’s Phil Daniels as Mark who steals this one.
This film is stark in contrast to the suburban settings of the middle class farces seen in previous weeks. Here there are no trees, the sky is grey and the council flats are dreary, indeed.
Meantime was notably more interesting in terms of it’s formal patterns. Effective use of moving camera as well as fixed low shots—the scene centered around the washing machine—oddly reminiscent of Ozu. This is another angle on family life, here is the not-working class. Leigh introduces race here, though it is more concerned with it’s critique of social services/public sector.
My dad laughed really only at off-screen bickering between Mark and Colin’s parents. Truthfully, the sparse humor came from the venomous exchanges of “fuck off” moments.

posted by Dweezil @ 10:11 PM

Made In Britain
Next on my directed reading “to watch” list was Alan Clarke’s riveting Made in Britain (1982) starring a young Tim Roth. We’ve also “Stan” from Grown Ups here as Harry the social worker. (Tim Roth is also appearing in Meantime the other bookend for the weeks viewings.)
Roth plays 16 yr old Trevor, a skinhead who’s been in the system for a while, a rough go. He thinks he’s hard, he’s got hate in his head and rage and he doesn’t care about anything.
The parts that really impacted me included the scene at the Job Center with the cards. Here Trevor makes lucid valid arguments about unemployment and the crumbling infrastructure of the “welfare” state in Thatcher’s England. In fact, many of his points register which affords the Trevor some agency to affect the viewer rather than just revolting them.
Formally vastly more interesting than the Leigh stuff we’ve been watching. Lots of markers of verité: moving camera, long takes, location shooting… Very well done, very well written and executed. I like the repetition of hallways and tunnels. So much claustrophobic movement. Trevor’s world is contructed as very closed off, the camera makes use of framing and proximity, holding him in close up and sometimes extreme close up.
I’ll be making comparisons to Meantime soon, so I don’t want to say too much.

House Bunny
I’m on my feet at the store all day long. I work super hard. With a bit of getup in my veins I had the place in ship-shape by 11:30. Then, time went so slow. I actually pulled up a chair and sat and watched, almost entirely uninterrupted, House Bunny (2008). This was a very funny movie. Think straight kid goes to college and pledges with the freak frat comedy of errors, a college farce. Well this was one of those clashing of stereotypes, synthesis of third way—an opening up, becoming—following of course the rules of the Hollywood genre game.
It was laugh out loud stupid fun; it was also socially conscious, media saavy, critical of hegemony and topsy-turvy. IT even goes so far as to say (literally: what happens when you give me “exactly what they want?”) The film doesn’t simply pit external beauty against internal beauty in a lose/lose binary. Instead, the film brings up many issues of femininity and patriarchal construction and proliferation of “woman” as a category, it opens a discussion about body image and acceptance. I liked it, I did…
Of course, in the end everything resolves itself to the normative through heteronormative coupling. It also taught me that the best women can perfectly balance their intelligence with superficial beauty, she shall willingly valorize idealizations of the feminine body and engage in the futile quest to attain such an inventive goal.

5th of September St.Henri
I sat on the floor of the locked film studies closet and wrote out my two summaries for class. There is a giant TV with VCR in the closet—which is more like a spare room-. I popped in the VHS of 5th of September St. Henri.
It would be interesting to see this done again, now, but formally similar. Multiple NFB/ONF directors-collaborateurs. What would that look like today? Might be quite lyrical. Could use the original English narration over top.
Interesting.

posted by Dweezil @ 11:47 AM

Watched Mike Leigh’s Grown Ups (1980) and Home Sweet Home (1982). Both were early Play for Today effort—a series of film for British television. Grown Ups was so chaotic it had many wonderful comic moments, but Blethyn’s “Gloria” is so unbearable, it is torture to side with Dick and Mandy. I enjoyed the parallel comparisons, contrasts and contradictions between the two couples.
Within this space of the narrative Leigh invokes class difference. Of course, Gloria lives with her mother, notably like Pat in Bleak Moments.
The chaos on the Butcher’s stairs near the end of the film could dissected using a Bahktinian lens of bodies, the grotesque or looking towards D&Gs theory on the Molar/Molecular.
Home Sweet Home was far easier to watch. Only Stan’s encounter with Janice from the laundrette was excruciatingly uncomfortable. SO much focus on the body.
Reoccurring motifs within Leigh’s early films:
Smoking
Eating
Tea
Couples – alone; with others as a couple; at work as individuals.
Work, evenings, tea, bed. Repeat.
Lots to say on the ethics of Tea, hospitality, gender and class.
Funny watching in the afternoon with mom and dad.

posted by Dweezil @ 10:06 PM

Friday nights are movie nights. I bring something home from the video store for me and Harper. Sometimes it’s a new release (Son of Rambow, Be Kind Rewind), often it’s something on VHS I liked when I was a kid in the 1980s; The Burbs, Big, Bad News Bears, Bill and Ted, and some films that start with letters other than B. Harper loves musicals, so we’ve lately been enjoying anything with Frank Sinatra. She loves Sinatra.
Last week was Guys and Dolls, tonight was Annie Get Your Gun (1950). After a showstopping-enthusastic-kid-dancing-infront-of-TV rendition of There’s No Business Like Show Business, Harper was transfixed.
Tracking problems and over saturated red hues aside it’s a good one! I saw Bernadette Peters and Tom Wopat on Broadway in 99/00 and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Bernadette Peters! I mean, that’s something to see!
This would be a real gem fixed up nice on a DVD.
She actually said to me, “mom will you bring some OLD musicals home this week?” I’ve also got The Music Man, Take Me Out to the Ball Game (her personal favorite) and Duck Soup (Marx Bros. = not a musical I know).

posted by Dweezil @ 10:49 PM

True to my word, there are few things I want to say about what was screened in the Monday lab: Night Mail (1936), La Lutte (1961) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007).
Night Mail is a short film that is a good example of cinema verite. It follows the procedures of a Mail train run in Scotland. It has commentary (narration) by John Grierson the father of contemporary documentary cinema and the founder of the National Film Board of Canada. It is beautiful, I have adopted Jerry’s cinematic romance with trains and boats and docks and rigs. Mostly trains. The film ends with a poem by WH Auden –in fact the film was written by the poet.
La Lutte is a favorite of mine. Nothing like a dose of Michel Brault to reinvigorate facets of my national identity. La Lutte is a film about the world of professional wrestling in the 1950s in Quebec. It features a match between The Kangaroo Brothers and world champion Edward Carpentier. It is theoretically based in Roland Barthes work, like many films of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, in semiotics and meaning production in culture.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is a remarkable film. I didn’t like it so much the first time. The second time I noticed so many things. It really got my brain buzzing. It touches on food loathing (Kristeva’s Theory of the Abject) paralleling the narrative that problematizes the pregnant body producing or pushing a nauseating effect on the viewer which coincides with the expression of Otilia’s body throughout the film. Of note, at the ending when the waiter offers the wedding menu—a plate of assorted organ meats.
“’I’ define myself at the same time that ‘I’ expel myself”.
Strangeness is invoked through dialogue as well as in the mechanics of the film—from the long 180˚ panning shots to the painting on the wall in the room “I don’t like this painting, it’s strange. What it is?” Gabriela comments as she climbs onto the bed and situates herself for the procedure. The procedure is shown without editing, it does not take very long and it seem like nothing at all. The frame is a medium wide shot at the level of the bed showing Gabriela, in full, laying face up knees towards the ceiling parallel to the frame.
The issue of abortion and the lengths this friend goes to help procure an illegal abortion in Romania under Ceausescu, is remarkable yet presented as simultaneously tense and mundane. The intense degree of anxiety produced as what a simple favor spirals into an “ordeal” with serious potential consequences. There is no preface to the film, but in Telluride the film was introduced by the director who explained the issue of freedom under the regime—namely the effect on women’s health issues including the legality of abortion (a treacherous subject anywhere).
The cinematography and long takes utilize the film vocabulary of alienation and oppression. The mise-en-scene is so rich, I could practically smell the must of the hotel. Beautiful.

posted by Dweezil @ 11:37 AM