When commenting Stylusite nyabinghi [sic] remarked in Chris Panzner’s review of Factotum that it sounded like the Best Movie Ever, I couldn’t help but agree in hyperbolic spirit, the combo of Bukowski’s ostinato alcoholism and Bent Hamer’s deadpan whimsy seeming a perfect match. Turns out two boredoms equals a boredom: can’t say, post-umpteenth firing of Matt Dillon’s Chinaski, I was satisfied with Hamer’s implicit acceptance of the lush’s idiocies. Episodic but repetitive, the languor gets nowhere.
On the other hand, if you, like me, enjoy your languor distilled into one big ambiguous steam bath ala the second half of Blissfully Yours, Old Joy offers it pretty literally, in the hot springs of Oregon forestry. Must say the Portland scenery made me ultra wistful, but what little there is of city life director Kelly Reichardt mines for maximum amiable ambience. Portland, my hometown, is still the only city where I can start up a conversation with any old street-walking meth addict without getting anxious, so a final chance meeting between Will Oldham’s Kurt and a noble derelict struck a personal chord. It also helps that I just left a budding P-town relationship behind, albeit one of a different nature than Old Joy’s renewed MOM friendship. Here unsettled, out-of-place Mark (Daniel London) and coercive metrosexual windbag Kurt wade through quietude in the form of backyard meditations and moist, secluded hikes, and disruptions in the form of smoothie-blending homelife and raging cicadas. Point being that tea-drinking granola-crunchers have their way regardless of location, be it greenery or suburbia – the film opens with a diatribe against the withered values of stay-at-home liberals, so like Yours, Joy offers the possibility that its bliss is feckless and redundant. Either way, this is a wonderful film, in a subtle, becalmed key.
I’ve mentioned the occasional walk-out-heavy screening here, but none has come close to the 30 or so in Sharon Lockhart’s structuralist experimental work, Pine Flat. And here’s the catch: most of them darted during the second shot. And we’re not talking about Monica Bellucci, taking it in a tunnel; we’re talking about a little girl reading a book. This is just one of 12 static takes loaded with the Mystery of Youth – what is she reading, we wonder, but also who is watching her, our prolonged gaze instilling a voyeuristic discomfort – and those filmgoers able to tap into that mystery are few and far between. I almost want to applaud the remaining audience members more than Lockhart herself (brave artist that she is), whether they “know” how to watch the film, or simply have the contemplative courage to at least try. There’s a guilelessness to the child actors harking back to the days of Lumiere, an innocence that is both very real and fastidiously organized, e.g. when two making-out couples seemingly commit to each other just by holding close indeterminately, it’s actually the final gesture of the girl who lifts her head up for air before swooping back down that confirms her romantic faith, undiscouraged by the need to breathe.
Cho Chang-ho’s The Peter Pan Story has a tricky title, but it makes perfect sense, if taken as existential plea, with the emphasis on “forever young” pained and fraught. Benignly opening with a happy-go-lucky swim training montage, Cho abruptly gives us suicide, nothingness, the enervated willpower. Bellicose teammates pushy in getting hero Hansoo back on the team are shown in obsequious negotiations a split second later. Nylon pantyhose is a fetish object and accessory to crime. Dealing in tonal dissonance and contradiction, Cho’s film is a virtual crash course in Semiotics 101 – if this movie were a song, it’d be the Buzzcocks’ “A Different Kind of Tension”. The director has assisted Zen arthouse superstar Kim Ki-duk, but I prefer the disciple to the master, on the basis that two meanings are better than one. Just as Justin Lin is doing Oldboy, perhaps this can be worked into an inspirational sports drama retitled Nihilism Road.
So, funny story. Right before Maria Maggenti’s Puccini for Beginners, I pull my glasses out of the side pocket of my backpack (I lost the case, and they actually aren’t even my glasses, but that’s another, longer story), and realize the left lens is missing. I can see shit reasonably clearly with only the right in focus, but the image looks just a bit blurry in a pretty headache-inducing way, so I tear out some paper from my notebook, color it black, wet it with spit, and drape it over the left socket of the glasses. Makeshift eye-patch. Worked like a charm. So glad we’re dealing with a 2-dimensional medium here. Not to be arrogant, but that story is more interesting than anything in this movie. It was also fun to see Maggenti introduce it while sexing up star Justin Kirk, the former obviously smashed and the two obviously banging each other. Even funnier is that Elizabeth Reaser’s bi neurotic bangs both leads of Flannel Pajamas in this movie. Which reminds me of a new organization I’m starting, the CAMJN, or, Critics Against the Miscasting of Julianne Nicholson, taking applications now. She’s so strident and sitcommy here it’s nearly possible to look at her and not fall in love all over again, which is just wrong. The movie? There’s some nice mockery of overused academic rhetoric, my favorite gag being the recurring auto-criticism “Author X is misogynist,” and these opera-loving thirty-somethings are more plausible than those in Match Point, bringing post-feminist hermeneutics to the table rather than archaic grandiosity. But basically, I usually shudder when I hear wispy retirees toss the descriptor “cute” at every other film playing here, but that’s what this is, more or less: inoffensive, free-spirited, pretty dumb, hey look there’s Julianne ohmygod.