Two famous Ruiz films are available on DVD through Blaq Out Cinema. They both consider the hidden meanings of images and their significance.
A narrative written out of art critical theory and history, presented as an art collector takes a floating narrator/POV through recreated tableaux of a painter’s oeuvre, including an argument that a painting is missing in the middle of it. Particularly, the collector asks you not see the images as merely symbolic or the serialization of them as merely development, but to look at how the compositions themselves lead the viewer through a sort of chronology.
A group of Catholic monks make a movie in 1948 and 1968. This pastiche cut of the two movies back and forth shows their struggles with representation in painting, statues, cinema, texts, and other methods of art and communication on their beliefs; lying under the surface is a crisis of faith and a conflict between two sects, but it’s hard to follow as Ruiz dispenses with continuity and narrative structure altogether, preferring to lay out the discussion as a series of individual struggles of consciousness and faith.
This movie is that once in a half decade, so aware and determined film that its general ‘otherness’ in style and form is self-defending, any sort of fragmented ‘weirdness’ one would want to mention is instantly normalized, as if cinema had always been and is supposed to be understood this way.
A young man walks through his emotional memories of a young woman, recreating moments in time with humor and self-criticism and empathy, leading her and the audience through his insatiable energy for emotional masochism and crippling fatigue for getting himself together, until she is invited to a showing of his short films about her and asked to comment on them, turning the film into psychodocudrama from a restrained and entrapped singular perspective. Animation, arts and crafts, poetry, and a shitty DIY bed are the frames. The content is his heart, which is malleable from scene to shining scene.
It’s also history, memory, and time travel, the best reasons to watch movies.
New media artist Johan Grimonprez takes the silhouette of airplanes and transforms it to a symbol of revolution, protest, and identity in this pre-9/11 documentary of the gradual increase of hijacking globally and its transformation from individual agents trying to redirect flights to bring attention to a cause to increasingly bloody and terrorist-driven attacks on the structures of the planes and the people in them. Documentary footage of plane hijacks from the 1960s to the 1990s is intercut with various commercial and avant-garde imagery and voice over selections of Don DeLillo’s postmodern alienation novels. Above all, Grimonprez points out the cameras that swarm to cover the hijacking or destruction of a plane and uses DeLillo’s passages to showcase how ‘a news of constant crisis replaces the need for a novel’ in modern life.
Infamous Russian b-film with a winning concept about marketing brands being actual demons that feed off of the desires of human beings is often criticized for being overly long and basically tone-deaf, mostly because it seems like the writer/producer/director team of Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerayn just went with every idea they had, pacing, character, or believability be damned. Sadly once the brand demons start fighting over Moscow and the main character starts screaming about “Advertising was started by LENIN!” you get an inclination to the bizarre-ass adventure the movie could have been.
Like his debut, Primer, a rather simple premise becomes a larger fragmented tapestry as Carruth turns every detail of Upstream Color into a heady mash of subjective narrators and relativistic camera angles. This time around the narrative follows Kris, traumatized victim of a brainwashing, as she magnetically connects to another and they slowly, in unfolding their relationship, struggle their way back to the kidnapper’s pig farm, a space that operates both literally and metaphorically and either way the physics work out. Those concrete details do a disservice to the unbalanced, psychedelic experience of actually watching the montaged sensoratorium that this film is.
It’s been years since Primer, as he’s tried to get A Topiary together and, eventually, managed to pull things together to release Upstream Color. His high concept science fiction phantasmagoria aren’t easy rides for audiences emotionally or intellectually, and as such he may be doomed to Kubrick or Malick levels of pacing between his release.
Inglourious Basterds felt like a missed opportunity for Tarantino to do something sober and slow-boiling, an opportunity he declined in order to maintain his brand of quirk. Django Unchained in contrast feels like Tarantino pursuing every opportunity, as his string out of events takes us through more aspects of slave trade and antebellum Southern culture than would be expected…. and using those set-pieces and contexts to wax out every last joke and bloody choreography he can, sometimes even the same joke a couple-three times. The result is surprisingly balanced but overly long, as every moment a character has freedom to develop shines but we get bogged down in Too Many Endings Syndrome and sequences like the five minute long KKK joke that could be cut entirely.
Fritz lights up a joint whilst being harangued by his fed-up housewife and flashes back and forward through time to other ‘lives’ of his, largely involving druggy phenomena, 70s era insanity, and a continuation of the look into the decaying immoral backdrop of the American streets. Missing some of the intensity and slow falling apart into madness of the original Bakshi production, this sequel more or less recreates the general look and then delights in long psychedelic montages and the sort of humor that makes contemporary Adult Swim seem like it was made by the PC police.
Sold mostly for Tommy Lee Jones’ performance as General Douglas MacArthur, Emperor nevertheless is set mostly around Gen. Fellers’ search for his lost love Aya while tasked by MacArthur to investigate the culpability of Emperor Hirohito for Japan’s war crimes during World War 2. The chisel-jawed blue-eyed blond-haired Matthew Fox as Fellers is a perfect sore thumb in an already shattered, slow-burning Tokyo, and despite some hammy dialog and pathos of the swelling orchestra type, Emperor nevertheless shows how the conflict of war and contrasting cultures doesn’t necessarily end when the one country surrenders and the other emerges victorious.
Ip Man earned a rapid cult status beyond the scope of most contemporary martial arts movies, partly because of the targeted mention that Ip Man is the master of Bruce Lee, but also because it’s that rare breed of kung fu movie that dispenses with the contrived set-pieces-towards-boss-lair set-up and actually contains character development and a plot. The story follows Master Ip’s confrontation of the occupying Japanese Imperialist Army during World War 2 by accepting an invitation to duel the dangerous Captain Miura.
Ip Man 2 (2011):
Donnie Yen returns as Ip Man, master of famed Bruce Lee, in a movie that is much more genre kung fu than the first installment. At first it seems like a set-up for escalating duels as Master Ip attempts to start a new school in Hong Kong, only to have to bid for acceptance in the Martial Arts Club, headed by Master Wong, who is matched in skills and talent. However, the movie gladly continues with the occupation of foreigners motif started in the previous film, this time featuring an English boxing club that’s exploiting the martial arts schools’ for profit. This iteration comes complete with a moral-of-the-story speech and a variety of silly accents that can’t seem to decide whether they’re English, Australian, or American, but who’s tracking?
Orson Welles’ most financially successful film has a plot that mirrors Hitchcock’s earlier Shadow of a Doubt (with a Nazi as opposed to a serial killer), a Welles monologue on the banality of evil that warms him up for his cuckoo clock speech in Reed’s later The Third Man, and an ending right out of his very first short film, The Heart of Ages. It was also the feature where the studio held the tightest reins and shows it, as clear cuts can be seen and Welles’ own performance is kept understated by the presence of the inimitable Edward G. Robinson.
