Recently at a busy opening, filled with illustrations, installations, and videos, I sat still, under headphones, for 29 minutes, while friends and strangers circled about intermittently, curiously, impatiently. Normally I would have returned at a quieter time to view the whole piece. But I could not interrupt the program, I tell you. I was mesmerized by Barry Doupé’s magical media potion, At The Heart Of A Sparrow. I contacted Mr. Doupé about sharing the mesmer here, and he kindly pointed me to a stream of the complete work at Lumen Eclipse, linked below.

UPDATE: Barry just sent along this link to an interview he gave in 2008 talking about his process and other sagacities (I hope I made that up). Thanks Barry!

I had thought that performances by Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman automatically created, if not masterworks, then certainly exceptional, outstanding cinema. In retrospect, that’s crazy talk and I don’t know what I was smoking, great though they both are. I came to understand this watching Doubt. His performance seems flat to me, considering the story and his role in it. Good thing she presents as complicated and magnetic a performance as ever. Right? Well, sure, if you’re not all greedy about stuff like theme and plot.  Or at least not impatient about these things. Because Doubt always feels like it’s about to boil up, so you stick with it, focus on Meryl, second guess where it’s going to go. And then -- it’s -- over? Fast forward with me now past the anti-climax and disappointment and confusion, through to the surprising delayed engagement this story had planted in me. The movie is made from rich enough concept that you can work out all kinds of premises, subtexts and motivations, all on your own! (If you have a good chunk of time afterward which will make no demands on your mind.) It’s a tell-yourself-a-great-story kit.

Hurrah, I have finally seen Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s award-winning 2003 film based on the Columbine school shootup. If I’d written this post last night, it would have been passionate, maybe all caps. I was a little stoned. Today, I am still inclined to post on it, but with the knowledge gained overnight that it hasn’t had the impact on me that I originally thought it had.

Strangely, I think both the immediate impact and its rapid dissipation come from the same feature of the film’s design: shallowness. Watching the slaughter of characters you’ve been getting to know for an hour or so is called Everynight TV, right? The reason you can yawn around between that and decorating and dancing shows, at the same time as you’re in IM on your laptop, is the artifice. You can recognize a Benz from the grill, and you can recognize a cop show from the music, cinematography and script cliches. You can only be so drawn into those stories, when you are constantly aware it’s Season 4 Episode 9. With Elephant, however, Van Sant presents you an unrecognizable scenario, in part by working improv with non-actors. But also by withholding dramatic devices which could be recognized as tropes: character arc, plot progression. The parts of your mind that normally turn off once they recognize the tropes, don’t turn off. You are observing more keenly. When the shit hits, you feel it more. Thing is, you developed no relationships, and you contemplated few or no concepts, so it doesn’t stay with you, like, in your heart. It stays in your brain as a masterful cinematic exercise, certainly. But you are untouched, ultimately, once the shock wears off.

And here is Gus Van Sant cutting the bugger on a FLATBED EDITOR. Divine.

I am a longtime apologist for slow pacing in cinema. There is something about that spacious temporal environment that feels luxurious to me. In the hands of a talented filmmaker, obviously.

Abbas Kiarostami is a director whose evangelical fans include Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, and Akira Kurosawa. His work is compared to that of Tarkovsky.

One of the most highly acclaimed Kiarostami films is 1997 Palme d’Or winner Taste of Cherry. I recently chose this for crossing-off from my discouragingly long list of cinematic masterpieces I’ve not yet seen. Here’s what I saw: a guy drives around and around on a dusty, barren hill, expressionless, occasionally engaging with strangers on the enigmatic job he offers. Well, the job becomes less enigmatic with each encounter.  But the driving does not become less around and around, the hill does not become less dusty or barren, and the expressiveness of this character does not increase.

He plans to commit suicide, and for some reason he wants to be buried in this remote, anonymous hillside hole after the fact. He’s already dug the hole, he just needs someone to refill it once his corpse is at the bottom. His prospective hole-fillers offer no interesting explanations for their refusals. I would estimate that there are 85 or 90 minutes of this movie in which the frame is the hero’s expressionless, driving face, or clay-coloured dust clouds billowing around the hero’s vehicle as it progresses along the dirt road that winds around the dusty, barren hill. The movie’s first ending is the guy in the grave, still alive. The movie’s second ending is the revelation of the cinematic device, in other words, shots of the director and collaborators on location.

Wanted to give this spot props for its manipulation of our understanding of how to identify whose story it is we are watching. The whole thing turns on that, and I don’t think I’ve seen much exploitation of it before. At least not without dialogue insurance.

I have not seen anything like this, and I would like to see more. I expect a lot of viewers would find the second half too long and slow, but I would like to be able to invent a potion that would enable anyone to quiet down to the place where you can just dream along with that second half, enjoying the alien voice of the shaman tiger ghost and the shimmering of the tree over the transfiguring cow in the jungle night.

Addendum: the first half is completely different aside from featuring the same two actors in roles that may or may not be related to their roles in the second half. It feels more conventional, in that a lot more is going on, and yet it is also unlike most things I’ve seen. It feels at once naive and worldly -- not just in the innocent, near-chaste relationship between two gay guys, but in all of its facets: the dialogue, the production values -- it could be amateur documentary, except for the regular sense of the poetic voice and crafty hand of the author here and there. Wow, check out that sentence. Anyway. The first half is wonderful in its own way, and I neglected to mention it earlier because the second half is kind of a show stealer.

Wendy and Lucy made me want to dig up all of Kelly Reichardt’s work and study it to see if I could learn how she creates “tension” or at least a sustained engagement out of thin air, seemingly. It is possible, of course, that one could watch Michelle Williams read a book and find it compelling. Anyway.

Got to follow the Film Society of Lincoln Center in your mode of choice, blog, twit, whatevs. Stuff like this is why:

All story all the time. Well, and stunning performance from the surveillance guy. Major pageturner. Couldn’t help but reflect on Stephen Harper’s views on the arts in Canada, watching this. Extra impressive as a first feature. Here’s the director on Charlie Rose.

The movie, while not exactly schlongfull, does contain 100% more schlong than the trailer. But I am misleading you as to the greatest virtue of this movie. The Man Who Fell To Earth? Endless marvelosity. And the pee shooting out of the pink microdress! Movies I felt, at least for a moment, while watching this: Logan’s Run, Easy Rider, L’eclisse, Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I guarantee if you try to tally your favorite visuals in this thing, you will lose count.

I can contemplate, graphically, serial murder. I can appreciate a 90-minute depiction of slaughter. Movies I have enjoyed: Natural Born Killers, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, Scarface, Aliens, Tarantino’s, etc. I just need a ripping yarn. Or a big idea. Or a weird idea. Or wailing special effects and stunts.

Well, there are no effects or stunts to speak of in No Country For Old Men. There are no big or weird ideas, at least not presented in any way you could sink your teeth into. The official tagline is “there are no clean getaways”, which I would paraphrase as “no free lunch”, and hope for a commentary on “America”, or greed, or laziness, or the Buddha’s first noble truth. Instead, I get a video game. A guy finds money and another guy hunts him for it, killing everyone in his path. I don’t know why the first guy is trying to keep the money. I don’t know anything about him. No external forces bear on them. There are two other characters who appear to be pointless. Woody Harrelson’s character appears to be intentionally pointless. Tommy Lee Jones may be intended to provide a philosophical and/or moral input, which could be good, except that it goes something like this:

-”Anytime you quit hearin ’sir’ and ‘ma’am’ the end is pretty much in sight”

Or maybe he’s intended to provide wry witticisms, which could be good, except that it goes something like this:

-”(It’s a mess, ain’t it.) Well if it ain’t, it’ll do til the mess gets here.”

I haven’t read the novel, but I’ve read that it’s about causality and fate. And indeed, the film has characters say, on several occasions, some variation of “you can’t stop what’s coming”. Now this could be an interesting idea, but as part of a “keep the psycho druglord away from his $2 million” plot, it’s kind of a no-brainer.

So you watch this series of murders of innocent bystanders, wrapped in absolutely nothing but the natural suspense of hunting, interrupted occasionally by the confusing pointlessness of Tommy Lee Jones, and for a brief time by the confusing pointlessness of Woody Harrelson.

And you say to yourself: Javier Bardem’s hairdo and method of shooting people is not enough to carry this material.

Surprising from the Coens.