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It’s days like this that make me realize how much I love going to school in this bizarre city. Some highlights: .
My Classics professor, while explaining the way Greeks saw the world as an opposition between forces (hot-cold; wet-dry), observed: “There is a lot of hot and wet stuff going on when people have sex.” A few minutes later, he exclaimed, “It’s complete poppycock!” I don’t remember what the context was at that particular moment, but it doesn’t really matter because… Poppycock! .
While sitting in front of Dwinelle, I was twice proselytized by soft-spoken Christians. Each time, I cut them short and said, “I’m not interested, but thank you.” One of them decided to press on and kept asking me rhetorical questions about religion. I responded by ignoring him and whipping out the Daily Cal. .
Cafe Intermezzo — now Cafe Mattina, though I will always remember it as Intermezzo — has a huge window that gives its patrons a front-row view of Telegraph Ave. There has always been an unspoken risk that patrons accept in order to partake in people-watching; the large glass pane feels like a semi-permeable barrier between the crazy subjects outside and the comparatively sane viewers inside. That barrier’s limits were tested today by an exceptionally aggressive bum who crept up to the window, lifted an accusatory finger at each of us, and tapped on the glass several times. He glared at the patron right in front of the window, a couple of feet ahead of me, and gave him a most awkwardly murderous look. And then he moved on. .
The moment was too perfect. Out came the sardonic and all-too convenient phrase my best friend and I had created for such inexplicable moments: “Oh, Berkeley!”
I apologize for not posting in a while. I’ve been fairly busy with school, and more importantly, my school newspaper, The Daily Cal, has hired me as an Arts Writer, so I’ll be writing reviews for them!
This means I’ll be posting less often on this blog, but I will provide a link to those articles here, and try to post occasionally on interesting tangential topics.
In the meantime, check out my first post on The Daily Cal’s Arts and Entertainment Blog, which is a review of Joe Berlinger’s documentary “Crude.”
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(A Note: This journal entry is from a series of reflections for my curating internship at the PFA. Visit Pete Gowdy’s website for more information about this particular screening.) .
It took me half an hour to find Oddball Films. And when I finally did find it, through a nondescript warehouse door facing a poorly lit side street in the Mission District, I knew I was in for an unusual experience. I climbed up a narrow flight of stairs and was buzzed into a large storage space lined with shelves filled with film reels stacked to the ceiling. It was a bit like walking through the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (Oddball has 50,000 films and videos in its archives, almost all of which are in 16mm.) I wandered into the back corner, the screening room, which, when filled to capacity, holds 60 people. Last night there were five people in the audience, not including the guest curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball’s director, Stephen Parr. “It’s usually slowest right after Labor Day Weekend,” Parr told me. “But when it rains, it gets really full. Yeah, we film people love shitty weather.” .
The setting was eclectic: a spinning disco ball glittered overhead while I settled into a ragged couch in the front row and the 16mm projectors clattered in the back. The screening was odd, but very intimate and homey-feeling. Maybe it was the couches, or the small audience, but it felt like I was with a family, laughing at the many silly films and trailers. Oddball seemed to be an exception to, or perhaps an extension of, Roland Barthes’ observation that theaters should provide a space that isn’t familiar, and allow viewers to sit anonymously in the dark. Here, familiar objects were retooled in a new, bizarre context, for the sake of film watching for film lovers. .
We weren’t given program handouts, but Gowdy gave an introduction before the program began, and provided interesting background information before and after many of the films were played. The theme of the night was obscure, tongue-in-cheek cinema from the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘70s. The program began with vintage commercials for products like Captain Crunch, Crest, Joy, Pampers, and Mego toys. I think there were a few too many commercials, but it was interesting to see how they differed from modern ads; they had narratives, and were more cause-and-effect oriented. We then watched a few trailers for cheap horror films from the ‘50s, like “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.” The commercials used vibrant, almost gaudy colors, and I think Gowdy put them first to grab our attention. In contrast, the trailers were shot in black-and-white, but they had a similar over-the-top, B-movie feel to them. .
The first short film was a very colorful, upbeat mini-documentary on the different ways people use cans; the second film was a melodramatic black-and-white short about a speed racer. It would have made more sense to place the black-and-white short right after the trailers, since they both lacked color (placing the documentary on cans after both black-and-white sections would have been more visually shocking and interesting, in my opinion). The rest of the films were silly, were about eccentric subjects (a claymation hippie rock band playing in the middle of a forest?), and many had tongue-in-cheek narrators. The last film, “Mystery in the Kitchen” (1959), was a skillfully made Canadian propaganda film that aimed to inform housewives about proper nutrition practices. It was shot in color, and the droll narrator communicated directly to the audience his misgivings about the way one particular housewife was “poisoning” her family through poor cooking. It was a nice wrap-up to the program because of its amusing tone and use of color. The downsides? It was the longest film of the night (I got antsy), and it made me feel extremely hungry.
I didn’t watch a lot of films last month, though I did help make a couple of videos: one was screened at the San Diego 48 Hour Film Festival and the other was submitted to the 2009 Flu Prevention PSA Contest (neither video ended up being selected as finalists, but I had a good time). I will see many more films during the next few months, because I’m taking three Film Studies classes and all of them are screening short films.
In any case, it is that time of month again. Here are the five best films I watched in August. I list the films in alphabetical order, and count first time viewings only.
Here’s a link to my Viewing Log, which has short takes on all the films I’ve seen this year, and another one for a list of the posts I made in August.
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)
Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966) The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
The Secret of NIMH (Don Bluth, 1982)
After watching “Zabriskie Point” (1970), the second of three English-speaking films that the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni made, I can’t help but feel that I’ve sat through a sham. MGM’s executives probably felt the same way after they saw how Antonioni used their multi-million dollar budget to create a film that’s set in America — “Zabriskie Point” is basically a big “fuck you” to everyone: viewers, producers, and Americans alike. We follow a free-wheeling pair of young adults, a college student and radical named Mark (Mark Frechette) and an administrative assistant named Daria (Daria Halprin), as they engage in a microscopic rebellion against some vague, intrinsically nefarious authority figures. Mark is part of a militant group of students who lay siege to their university. As far as I can tell, this uprising takes place only because the administration is part of the “establishment.” Violence erupts, and Mark is falsely accused of killing a cop, so he flees, improbably, in a small plane, to the middle of the desert. Daria, it seems, is merely playing hooky from work (her boss seems kind enough, but he’s a developer, and thus a member of this “establishment”). She happens to be driving in the same desert that Mark is flying through. When he notices Daria on the road below, he engages in a bizarre form of foreplay by flying his plane just over her car, “North by Northwest”-style, before landing and cheerily meeting up with her. .
Antonioni’s camera loves tracking these young, beautiful people as they trot about on completely barren desert landscapes; less apparent is his reason for following them in the first place. It’s near impossible to tell what they are rebelling about, and it doesn’t help that his two protagonists are played by first time actors who have many lines of dialogue. In “Red Desert” (1964), Antonioni brilliantly played with the atmosphere by making Italy’s newly industrialized landscapes look beautiful and terrifying at the same time. I was hoping that the wordless stretches in “Zabriskie Point” would be better than the parts where Mark and Daria must speak to each other, if only for the chance to gaze at beautiful, undeveloped American landscapes. They are better, but unfortunately, they also feel pointless. . .
This is troubling: if Antonioni can’t make his landscapes all that interesting, what are we meant to take from his film? I suppose we can chew on the 20-minute orgy sequence on the desert sand, which must be one of cinema’s most strenuous, protracted, and awkward attempts at selling sex in the wilderness as something that is appealing and liberating. Perhaps Antonioni’s vision feels imprecise because he simply didn’t know what he wanted to make his film about. There is one stunning sequence at the end, where a large house in the middle of the desert blows up and becomes an impressive fireball. That moment is followed by a series of beautiful high speed shots of household appliances exploding, set to an original Pink Floyd track. These shots look very cool, and I bet that a good chunk of the budget was quite literally blown up to create the effect. As a visual expression of a young generation’s frustration, the sequence can’t be beat; but the scene feels isolated, as if it came from a different, more cohesive world. It seems like Antonioni made a mistake; that he got himself involved in a project that didn’t turn out being all that interesting to him; that he was in over his head in trying to deconstruct contemporary America; and that in trying to connect with young, anguished audiences he ended up making a film that was hobbled from the start. “Zabriskie Point” pretends to have lofty aspirations, but in actuality it is about nothing, and consequently achieves nothing of great significance. .
(A Note: I highly recommend watching the final sequence here. I believe it’s the only exceptional sequence, and watching it on its own will not spoil the rest of the film. I would also like to thank my friend Recca, who happens to be a pretty big fan of “Zabriskie Point,” for giving me information on its production.)
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, “Inglourious Basterds,” like his other films, opens with a conversation. We are in Nazi-occupied France, and an S.S. officer named Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), donning a gray military suit and flashing a wide, friendly smile, befriends a farmer whom he suspects has been hiding Jews. The two talk at a table for a good 20 minutes; the farmer manages to stay calm while the Jewish family he is hiding cowers beneath his house’s floorboards. It is a fantastic sequence, and Tarantino beautifully raises the intensity not through confrontation but by depicting the changing dynamics between two men in conversation — Landa gradually breaks down the farmer’s defenses through sheer intellect and charm. The sequence wraps up with a spurt of surprisingly bloodless violence; an overhead shot of S.S. soldiers firing through the floorboards while wood splinters spray out toward the camera. Only one Jew, Shosanna, escapes, and plays a pivotal role in the near future. .
Tarantino seems to thrive on the historical setting by disregarding a potentially stifling commitment to accuracy, and a reverence toward victims of the Holocaust. His film is basically a costume drama, though it is anything but tedious. We follow a group of Jewish American soldiers, led by Lt. Aldo Raine, who is played by an enthusiastically over-the-top Brad Pitt. Their objective: to slaughter Nazis. (“Each and every man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps!” Raine barks). “Inglourious Basterds” doesn’t offer us any obvious moral codes, but it isn’t amoral, either. The Jews’ acts of cruelty toward the Nazis are rarely glorified; they feel just as sadistic as those of the Germans. Landa, the film’s main villain, is a rather clichéd character, but Christoph Waltz’s brilliant performance makes the character completely enthralling. His S.S. officer is skilled at his job — doing “detective work” and hunting Jews — and resorts to explosive violence only on rare occasions. He can be scary, but he is mostly charming, even seductive; he even speaks many languages fluently. In short, Landa is the devil incarnate. .
Landa is also in charge of security at the screening of Goebbels’ newest film, “Nation’s Pride.” The event takes place in Paris, at a beautiful theater that Shosanna now operates, and Hitler and other German leaders are in attendance. There are two separate conspiracies to eliminate Germany’s leadership — one by the Basterds and a German actress spying for the Allies, and the other by Shosanna — and they both unfold in this theater. Tarantino’s love of cinema is even more apparent in “Inglourious Basterds” than it is in his other work. He seems to recognize that film can be a double-edged sword: for the Nazis, it is a medium that serves as propaganda material, as well as a source of entertainment. But in Tarantino’s fantasy, cinema also has the potential to quite literally bring down the Third Reich: in the middle of “Nation’s Pride,” Shosanna’s theater is set on fire by the burning of hundreds of nitrate prints. . .
Tarantino works best when working within polished, self-contained episodes; he continues to play to his strengths, partitioning “Inglorious Basterds” into five distinct chapters. Each episode is built up quietly at first, with dialogue, until it reaches a boil, and culminates in a visually arresting sequence of violence. Those dynamic moments, shot by the cinematographer Robert Richardson, are technically astounding: the conflagration in the theater and a meeting in a bar that snaps into violence particularly stand out. “Inglourious Basterds” has a somewhat predictable construction, with stretched out exchanges between bastards (and Basterds), Nazis, and double agents that must inevitably end in bloodbaths. The dialogue is the film’s centerpiece; and while there are not many memorable lines like there are in “Pulp Fiction,” Tarantino’s use of language as a tool that extends the suspense and heightens the atmosphere has never been more effectively implemented.
