Trying new things
Missy | September 24, 2008
3rd Street at 3rd Avenue, Gowanus, Brooklyn. Holga camera, double exposure.
Bike log, volume 1
Missy | September 20, 2008
This early fall weather is marvelously energizing - I woke up this morning with a yen to ride all the way to the ocean. Or, it could be I was feeling jiggly from a delicious dinner last night at Henry’s End. By the way, that dinner followed seeing the film Momma’s Man, about a man shirking his responsibilities as a father and regressing back into being a son. It’s terrific and features filmmaker Azazel Jacob’s real-life parents. (His father is experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs who, although says very little in the film, has a really great presence. Also, I can only assume that the parents’ apartment is Flo’s & Ken’s actual home; anyone curious as to what an old school downtown artists’ loft looks like, best get yourself in front of this film. Totally charming.)
Yes, so. Hopped on the bike for a few hours today. Thanks to the Gmaps pedometer, I could trace my route + mileage! Neato toy that I’m going to get regular use from in the future. (Hat tip: Ezra.)
Today I saw Ditmas Park (Victorian and beautiful), Midwood (Jewish enclave full of people walking and socializing on the way to/from services), Sheepshead Bay (fishy stinky!), Manhattan Beach (tiny and full of not tiny people in tiny bathing suits), Flatbush (traffic-heavy, but a bakery truck had my back once its driver yelled out to me, “Nice wheels!”), Heights Crown & Prospect (I have some familiarity with these neighborhoods already). As a reward for what would ultimately be 21 miles, I took a sidetrack on Avenue J in Midwood to Di Fara but it was, as usual, nuts. Another day.
Photos on Flickr soon.
TIFF - Final Post
Missy | September 14, 2008
Chinatown, Toronto
I saw only 23 films this year but it felt like fewer…and I left a day earlier than usual. I can’t explain this feeling, other than to say I feel blessed that most of the films clocked in between 90 and 110 minutes, which means I had more time to sleep, walk around, and even get a manicure. Anyway, as I was walking back from Saturday morning’s screening, it occurred to me that if I could identify one thing that links many of those 23 films, besides relatively short runtimes, it’s vomit. It’s true! More films than not featured some sort of barfing scene. Believe you me, I was just about barfy enough myself to want to yell out, “Enough already with the vomit!”.
Enough already with the vomit. Let me wrap up with some of the films I saw over the final couple of days. Richard Parry’s Blood Trail is a documentary tracing 15 years in the career of war photographer Robert King. As you might guess, the most compelling portions of the film are also the most gruesome; King seems to reinforce the detachment that comes with not only witnessing but communicating the world’s worst deeds and questions whether that detachment happens as a coping mechanism or if it is inherent to those called to combat situations. As documentaries go, it could’ve been beefed up with more career highlights and lowlights, less concentration on present day deer hunting scenes. (King was raised and now lives in Tennessee, where much of the interviewing takes place.) We first see him as a green 24-year-old in Sarajevo who does, says, and wears the wrong thing. He comes across as the kind of guy who is a bit of a smart-mouthed jerk but who is nevertheless well liked for his humor, adventurousness, and good looks. One could extrapolate that these are the fundamental traits that make a good combat journalist. The film concludes with footage from Iraq, with an older, seasoned, more cynical version of King’s younger self. Until now, it never really occurred to me what it means to be embedded: it doesn’t just mean you live on military bases and travel with military units both for your protection and for direct access to the unit. It also means that you do not have the opportunity to interact with the locals unless, as King puts it, the military is kicking someone’s door in. And, it means that there are some things you are not allowed to see if the military doesn’t want you to document it, undoubtedly the most frustrating of all scenarios for King or any journalist.
One could argue that we as audience members were embedded in Steven Soderbergh’s Che. (I wish I could say I came up with that analogy all by myself, but it was really borne out of an extended conversation with Josh over dinner, during which we both became increasingly frustrated with the film.) I feel like Soderbergh squandered his opportunity for a robust biopic; Benicio Del Toro’s ordinarily praiseworthy, understated performance only added to what resulted in an enigma. Is it too much to ask that I wanted the film to be provocative, at least as provocative as the myth of Che has become in contemporary society? That there was probably some motivation worth discussing behind Che abandoning a lucrative service career and a family to start revolutions? (In case you were wondering, I put my own politics on the shelf when I watched this film.) To offer historical context? For example, I was angry that Soderbergh lazily does away with better establishing the political-economic situation in Bolivia that would draw a foreign revolutionary into leading an unwinnable conflict, the film’s second half. It just doesn’t make sense to treat Che as merely a freelance guerilla, or to assume that the audience would understand (much less agree with) the ‘why’. (At least the first half, the Cuba segment, featured intercutting of Che’s New York City interview and speech before the U.N., which offer evidence–only evidence–of Che’s controversial status and charismatic personality.)
I do get that Soderbergh made the conscious decision to to show Che’s rise and as well as his fall, which is, I guess, why Che’s break from Castro and his time in the Congo were elided. And yet, Soderbergh was obviously unconcerned with the length of the film! So, we spend four and a half hours being instructed (if ‘instructed’ is the appropriate word here) on South American guerilla tactics. Here’s how it plays out in reality: This scuffle happened, then that battle happened, then this one, and all these people lived in the jungle for many months on end. They win, then they lose, the end. So infuriating. If I’m going to be infuriated, it ought be at the hands of Che Guevara, not the film’s director, dammit!
You know what? I think the following photo illustrates my feelings toward this film:
Finally, there’s Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. You’ve probably heard that Mickey Rourke fully commits to the role of aging wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson. And he does. He’s a man who has only his 20-year old glory to hang on to, as if he has attempted to freeze (or merely ignore) time. The present sneaks up on him when a heart attack nearly kills him and he tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter and attempts to create a real relationship with his favorite stripper (played by Marisa Tomei, whose character too is stuck in another era and must deal with her own ageism issues).
Overall, I find the film to be very sympathetic toward Randy–at times it even felt Dardennes-esque in its sympathy for Randy and the underclass and their lack of options–but there’s a part of me nagged by a curiosity of why Aronofsky chose this subject in the first place. Maybe it’s because I don’t trust Aronofsky. Of course, it’s difficult not to mock cheesy 80’s metal, spandex, tanning beds, long bleached hair, and widespread wrestling fandom. Yet the film didn’t feel as if it was mocking anything, though it makes unsubtle observations on the wrestling culture, now housed in local VFW halls instead of large arenas and evolved into a lust for blood in a “sport” that is still unambiguously staged–the wrestlers comply just to make a buck. Still, audiences in Toronto and at Venice were both impressed and moved.
My top 8 (I didn’t feel right naming 10) films of the 2008 Toronto Film Festival:
1. Hunger
2. It Might Get Loud
3. When It Was Blue
4. Summer Hours
5. Sugar
6. Still Walking
7. Wendy and Lucy
8. The Wrestler
[By the way, my favorite from last year's fest, Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light is screening at the MoMA at the end of the month. Go, go, go, go, go, go. It coincides with NYFF time, and I too will be NYFFing, but I cannot wait to see this film again. You cannot wait to see it for the first time.]
Finished up the week with a nice steak dinner at Barberian’s. We had their house chocolate mousse for dessert. It’s a chocolate house! Full of mousse!
Bye Canada, for another year.
TIFF Updates - Wednesday
Missy | September 10, 2008
Sam gives the brush-off.
I played poker the past two nights. On Monday I went out both first and second. How is that even freaking possible, you ask? I went out. I re-bought in to the game, and went out again. Worst poker night of my life. Last night was the opposite: I was the chip leader for a good stretch until we were down to three players and I died at the hands of experts.
Films! No, I did not see the Paris Hilton documentary and, at the risk of sounding like a total asshole elitist, I wouldn’t ever waste my money on that trash. Turns out the reviews are calling it the stinker that it undoubtedly is. Other, more positive reaction not coming from me: Demme’s Rachel Getting Married was widely highly enjoyed. As for me, your most humble sometime correspondent, I had a so-so day yesterday only to make up for it today. In the so-so category, you may be interested to know that Rian “Brick” Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom is terrifically funny and full of sight gags, until it isn’t, when it tries to settle down into the serious existential questioning. The film belongs to Rachel Weisz who rescues a role verging on too cutesy/quirky. All said, you can’t help but love her.
In the “much better” category, I attended my first Wavelengths feature. Wavelengths is the festival’s avant garde programming. I know next to nothing about AG filmmaking but found Jennifer Reeves’ dual projection of high-contrast nature footage with hand-painted/illustrated film When It Was Blue both arresting and inspiring. (I mean that; I’ve got some ideas to explore in still photography when I get home.)
I’m also a fan of Ryan Fleck’s and Anna Boden’s Sugar, a film partly about a Dominican baseball player and mostly about the contemporary immigrant experience. I wanted to ask Ryan during the Q&A whether or not the project was inspired by the Red Hook ball fields/leagues, but figured it would be too, uh, inside baseball-y for the Toronto crowd. Like their previous film Half Nelson, set in Gowanus Brooklyn, Fleck and Boden demonstrate a strong sense of place. Their Iowa is so authentic, down to the baseball game announcer’s midwestern accent. Please do look for it when it comes out (in the springtime to coincide with the opening of baseball season).
Finally, as part of an ongoing theme of multi-generational families and their prickly worlds (see: Kore-eda’s Still Walking, Deplechin’s A Christmas Tale), I really took to Olivier Assayas’s L’Heure d’ete (Summer Hours), a delicate and moving look at the sentimental attachments arising when handling a family estate. That description maybe sounds dry, but anyone who has gone through the physical property following the death of a loved one can relate to the need to honor the loved one, retain history, and yet detach oneself from burdensome nostalgia.
Still ahead: Synecdoche, New York, The Wrestler, and the new Claire Denis, surprisingly being talked about as “accessible” (which is funny to anyone who saw her mindboggle L’Intrus a few years back…did that ever find a distributor?)
I think I’m taking tonight off to catch up on Mad Men and sleep.
TIFF Updates - Monday
Missy | September 8, 2008
Graffiti Alley, Toronto
I spent the entire first half of Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (adapted from Robert Kaplow’s book of the same name), a period piece about Orson Welles’ riskily contemporized 1937 production of Julius Caesar. trying to reconcile in my head that I was watching a Linklater film. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, because during the Q&A, one woman quite aggressively asked, “Why this project? Why now?” Linklater’s response was less than satisfactory: “I liked the book. I bought the options. I don’t know.” There’s nothing particularly wrong with the movie, although it is somewhat thin. Claire Danes’ elastic face works surprisingly well in close-up, considering her role is merely serviceable, and Christian McKay’s Welles is both funny and a world class prick. (The best part of the film is Zoe Kazan’s supporting character. I look forward to seeing her on stage with Kristin Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard in Mamet’s revival of Speed the Plow The Seagull this fall. *)
Update: I started writing that bit a couple of days ago and I’ve since grown bored thinking about it. I’ve seen other stuff since that I’d rather talk about!
Davis “An Inconvenient Truth” Guggenheim’s It Might Get Loud is a festival highlight. (Unfortunately, I was not at the screening with Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. People apparently and justifiably went nuts.) The central premise is the guitar, but the film packs in three biographies, three sets of influences, three characteristic styles (Page’s pure technical talent, Edge’s technological approach, White’s inner conflict rooted in the blues) plus lots of great concert footage and some jamming on top of it all, all in a efficiently-packed 97 minutes. There’s a moment when Page starts playing “Ramble On” and White can barely contain his reverence behind a grin and The Edge’s eyes glow, as if he’s thinking, “Holy shit, Jimmy Page is playing right in front of me.” It is both a joyous experience and a chance for music nerds to geek out.
My other festival favorite so far, for completely opposite reasons, is Steve McQueen’s audacious debut film, Hunger, based on events at The Maze in Northern Ireland in 1981 leading up to a hunger strike. Depending on your perspective, the inmates are political prisoners or terrorists, but the experience was horrific for everyone involved. The film is gorgeously shot and the set-up is extremely long, moving from one character to the next with little backstory, before converging on Bobby Sands. The film repeatedly questions the value of human life in the context of political game theory, most memorably in a both funny and charged two-take scene between Sands and his priest.
Seven films in, but there’s still so much left to see. More to come.
* I got my plays and actors confused. Elizabeth Moss from Mad Men will be in Speed the Plow.
It’s time to TIFF
Missy | September 4, 2008
So…I’ll be attending approximately 2/3 of the Toronto Film Festival again this year. There’s new Dardennes, Desplechin, Kore-eda, Denis, and Assayas. And, of course, the 4.5 hour Soderbergh, for which I’m turning pink in anticipation. One lesser-known that I’m looking forward to is the film Uncertainty. I never saw and know nothing about Suture, the filmmakers’ debut. I just count myself a fan of both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Olivia Thirlby. We’re also looking forward to Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to Old Joy and starring Brooklyn’s sweetheart Michelle Williams.
Sorry to be brief now (I have to pack and, uh, watch the rest of 90210) but look for regular updates throughout the next week including…wait for it…video blogging! Maybe! With, perhaps, special guests.
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Listening
Unmap
Volcano Choir
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Reading
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
David Foster Wallace
