Friday, May 29, 2009
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16 comments:
Only if you are a Glen Danzig fan.
Now Ozzie Ozbourne has transformed into the director of Tokyo Story?
As worn by taste-making UCLA/TFT students.
So the kid wearing the De Palma tee is like Stewart on Beavis and Butthead who wears his Winger shirt while hanging out with B&B.
Anyone wearing that De Palma shirt should be forced to the Hell of watching MISSION TO MARS. It's one of the worse Chinese hells.
You mean, are they grasping at straws in order to extend the "These are our rock stars?" premise? Probably. Visually, the Ozu/Ozzy is my favorite.
It shouldn't be that hard to come up with an apt rock logo for Scorsese, but I don't recognize the one they picked.
The Scorpions.
I'm just saying that Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, John Carpenter, or Uwe Bolle would be preferable to Brian De Palma.
As always....
The deadly adolescent combination of ironic snobbery ("I'm wearing these designs that dumb people wear, but really advertising my love of cool things") and wit.
Bela Tarr!
A steak dinner and a bottle of good Bordeaux for the person who can finish in one sitting Tarr's 450 minute masterpiece "Satantango"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1t%C3%A1ntang%C3%B3
Plot:
The plot deals with the collapse of a collective farm in Hungary near the end of Communism. Several people on the farm are eager to leave with the cash they will receive for closing down the community, but they hear that the smooth-talking and charismatic Irimias, who had disappeared over two years ago and whom they thought to be dead, is returning. Much of the film's plot concentrates on the impact and consequences of Irimias' return through multiple POVs as the communers must cope not only with Irimias' scheming, but that of each other.
Style:
According to Tarr himself, there are roughly only 150 shots in the entire film[1]. Many shots last up to nearly 10-11 minutes, such as several dance sequences, during which the camera rarely moves, but we see the main characters dance and drink.
The opening shot, in which the camera trucks alongside a herd of cows, lasts nearly 8 minutes. There are numerous shots depicting main characters walking (and talking) for minutes at a time, unimpeded by a cut. Whereas films that feature long takes usually have many short takes to offset the long ones, this film does not.
Critical reaction:
The late novelist and filmmaker Susan Sontag described Sátántangó as "Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I'd be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life." The film has been the subject of controversy. The film has a sequence in which a child tortures and poisons her cat.
Available here on DVD (Expensive, though. Might try Netflix)
http://www.amazon.com/Satantango-Mihaly-Vig/dp/B000GTJSE4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1243785405&sr=1-1
Of course.
"That's not argument, it's just contradiction."
"No, it isn't."
I sat through Ulysses' Gaze. I think I can handle Satantango. When Jody and I were watching Ulysses' Gaze, there came a point in the viewing where we became certain that the director was still in the process of filming and editing as we were viewing and that every time we thought we might be approaching the end, he had just completed a new reel.
It comes in at less than three hours, but it feels like an eternity.
UG may have been the film Peter Rainer famously wrote about from the NY Fil Festival: He had been watching a single shot of a house burning for close to ten minutes when the overwhelming need to pee arose. When he returned from the rest room the same shot was still crackling on the screen. He turned and left and never looked back.
I loved Ulysses'Gaze. Has a particularly good performance by Harvey Keitel. (Although, in the way of these things, the movie was shot with all the performers speaking in their own languages. As a result, Keitel was left undubbed in the print that I saw, leaving me with the impression that he was playing an AMERICAN film director -- leading to a couple of crucial misunderstandings of the plot.)
The movie that Rainer fled was almost certainly Tarkovsky's Sacrifice, which was shot by Sven Nykvist. Rainer's reaction tells more about him than the movie, as it happens, since to many the burning house is one of the high points of Tarkovsky's career:
Wikipedia says:
Most of the film takes place inside or around a house that was specially built for the production. The climactic scene at the end of the film is a long tracking shot in which Alexander burns his house and his possessions. It was done in a single, six minute, fifty second take, often misstated as Tarkovsky's longest shot. The shot was very difficult to achieve. Initially, there was only one camera used, despite Sven Nykvist's protest. While shooting the burning house, the camera jammed, ruining the footage. (This disaster is documented in documentary entitled Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and the documentary One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich.) The scene had to be reshot, requiring a quick and very costly reconstruction of the house in two weeks. This time two cameras were set up on tracks, running parallel to each other. The footage in the final version of the film is the second take, which lasts for several minutes and ends abruptly because the camera had run through an entire reel in capturing the single shot. The cast and crew broke down in tears after the take was completed.
Liking UG is a deal breaker. You are now banished to the Hell of watching Mission to Mars.
I had a UG experience similar to Rainer's Sacrifice experience, but it involved an 11 minute shot of Lenin's head.
I tried to watch Mission to Mars and gave up after about a half-hour. So I'm not immune to the effects of boredom.
Poking around while I'm eating lunch I noticed to my surprise that Ghost fave Richard Corliss was responsible for putting Ulysses' Gaze on Time's list of the 100 greatest movies.
Clearly YMMV...
"Your Mama Married a Vegan"?
"Youth Mars a Marvelous Vacation"?
"Yellow Man Milks a Vole"?
Your Mileage May Vary. It's a phrase that we use on the 'internet' to indicate that different people may have a different reaction to the same stimulus.
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