One Last Number Before We Go: L’Argent

So hey! I’m starting a new series, because I don’t have enough apparently. Something has always fascinated me about great director’s later films. Wouldn’t, as you get more practice and more experience, make deeper and more complex films? Obviously that’s not quite true. No one, for example, would argue that Family Plot is superior to Rear Window. Or that Some Like It Hot is a worse film than Buddy Buddy.

Why is this? Why do some directors, considered the greatest of all time, gradually descend into cinema that could charitably be described as “not their best.” On the other hand, what motivates some artists to produce some of their best work as their final films. Of course some films, like Paprika or The Sacrifice were completed when their directors were dying suddenly of fast acting cancers, and therefore are representative of the peak of their creative powers. These always feel like we were robbed far too soon.

Here we find in Robert Bresson’s L’Argent a special case.  Like Bela Tarr would after him, Bresson’s final film came in 1983, more than a decade before his death in the early 90s.  This, to me, communicates something important about L’Argent, a very specific intent on Bresson’s part that this be the end of his body of work.  And honestly, this is pretty galling considering the actual content of the film. 

What I Think About When I Think About Birdman

It’s kind of hard to parse my thoughts on Birdman, they’re big, messy and they get all over the place. If you clicked on this expecting Birdman, don’t worry I get to it.

Arbitrary Lists: New Waves

Alright, this is a new feature I’ve got called Arbitrary Lists. Basically, I will take a group of things that are connected in some way and rank them.  Some categories will be obvious, some will be dumb, hopefully they’ll all be fun. Today, I’m going to do rankings of five of the most famous “New Waves” in film.  Let’s meet the contestants!

Fun Fact: If you Google “New Waves” you get this image and a bunch of images from a fan-service manga.

Russ Meyer SMACKDOWN! Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! vs. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

If you’ve spent anytime on Tickld, I Waste So Much Time, or some similar site you might have seen this guy.

He and his message seem superficially empowering for about 35 seconds before you realize that he’s just telling women what to do via his privileged male position. This image smacks of an insincerity and fundamental failure to understand that women are people who do not exist for his benefit.

I guess what I’m saying is: I know what I’m doing, and I feel very sorry about it.

That said, 60s girls were the best looking and cutest in recent memory. I’m not going to attempt to rationalize this position any farther except to post a picture of my favorite actress of all time.

Oh, Anna. You’re so dreamy.

Enough Rand Paul-ing (I swear this was a topical reference when I started this article), let’s get to what this thing is actually supposed to be about.  It stands to reason, for the reasons elaborated above, that I’d probably be a pretty big fan of Russ Meyer, the 60s trash auteur known for his love of campy dialogue, ridiculous plotting and most importantly, his love of beautiful women with giant boobs. So let’s put his two best known films up against each other.  Will Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! win, being (in John Waters’ estimation) the greatest film of all time? Or will the Roger Ebert scripted sprawling in-name-only-sequel to a dumb showbiz melodrama Beyond the Valley of the Dolls kill kill it? Find out right now!

What I’m Excited for at Cannes 2013

So last year I did a thing on Facebook where I wrote a short list of what I was excited for (or not excited for) at the Cannes film festival (Did Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt ever come out here?). So I thought I’d do a similar thing for the blog this year.  Let’s get down to it.

Spring Break Tarkovsko-thon: Sacrifice and Wrap Up

And with Sacrifice, the Tarkovsko-thon is over!

That was way harder than I expected. That said I’m really glad I did it.  In this post, I’ll be going through my final opinions on Tarkovsky’s work as a whole as well as my rankings of his movies, from my favorite to least favorite, with a couple of extra categories thrown in there. Maybe I’ll do an awards style thing.

But first, Sacrifice.

Spring Break Tarkovsko-thon: Nostalghia

Nostalghia has the makings of a real masterpiece, a semi-autobiographical (the main character is named Andrei and is exiled from Russia) story about painful separation from your homeland.

Then, at around the hour and forty minute mark, the movie kind of…breaks.

But let’s not talk about that, at least till later.

Spring Break Tarkovsko-thon: Stalker

Wow. The 70s was a great decade for Tarkovsky, wasn’t it? Two cerebral sci fi masterpieces with a semi-autobiographical fever dream in the middle. Stalker brings the decade to a close by presenting various visual and thematic rhymes that Tarkovsky had developed in Solaris and The Mirror.  It’s also the best use of atmosphere I’ve yet seen in Tarkovsky’s work. So I guess I’ll talk about that…

Spring Break Tarkovsko-thon: The Mirror

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror is a dream-like semi-autobiography made up of scenes that are either flashbacks, memories, dreams or a combination of all three.  It is unconventionally structured and deeply personal and it works when it really shouldn’t.

I don’t know why, but the fact that that one string is not floating is just the creepiest thing in the world to me…

The Mirror is responsible for some of the most beautiful and nightmarish images I’ve yet seen in a film.  It twists and turns like that dream you had.  You know, the one you that you can’t really figure out if it was a nightmare or not.  Also, there’s one part where a character looks like the Sadako from The Ring.

Spring Break Tarkovsko-thon: Solaris

In his book Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema, Robert Bird quotes Tarkovsky on the subject of colour.

“Tarkvosky noted that the only phenomena that are always perceived as colourful  are sunsets and other ‘transitional states of nature’.  To make the spectator see colour is thus to convey the transition within the represented object, corresponding to a change in texture.”

Solaris was the first colour film that Tarkovsky shot, and also his first science fiction film, which he will later return to. It was also the only of his movies I had seen before the Tarkovsko-thon, and for the record, I really enjoy just sitting in the beautiful cinematography and melancholic story. However, as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests, what I want to focus on is Tarkovsky’s esoteric use of colour in Solaris.

For the most part, Solaris is shot in vibrant colour, which as the quote above would indicate, means that Tarkovsky feels that the main character of Kris Kalvin is in transition in some way.  This makes a certain amount of sense, as black and white is often a visual shorthand way of showing flashbacks or past events, and this is the first Tarkovsky film to be set in the future. At the same time, moments of monochrome do invade the film, and where they land, I think, is part of the key to understanding the film.