Monday, December 31, 2007
A Non-fiction New Years Eve
It wasn't planned, but of the stuff I have laying around is lots of non fiction film laying around so a theme kind of developed to this New Years.
Good Night and Good Luck
It felt like a white collar western. Actually more like a Star Trek movie where the forces of good had to deal with the intellectual evil. Joe McCarthy equals evil tyrannical creepy and a threat to democracy. CBS News equals righteous and the only ones that can make the necessary adjustment to society.
But at the end both the Murrow gang and McCarthy both got eaten. McCarthy by the senate process that Murrow's programs awoke. Murrow by the conflict of servicejournalism and commercial reality.
I will see Clooney's films in the future. I very much appreciate the way he would let the camera linger for a few beats longer on the screen than the tempo we are used to. It gives the audience a chance to think about what they just saw. The other admirable technical achievement is the brilliant way they integrated telecine newsreel with black and white. If I was writing an ad copy blurb for this I would say "Liberal and Moving"
Factory Girl
Edie Sedgwick. The look is there. Depictions of some of the factory's beautiful people such as Gerrard Malanga are great to look at.
I think I am really stretching the concept of a non-fiction New Years with this one.
It only feels true or authentic up to a point. Ultimately, Factory Girl has the same indy film problem that This is England suffered from. Things are darned interesting until the central conflict of the film shows up with nearly half the running time left to go. In this case, it is the arrival "the musician" aka Billy Quinn aka Bobby Dylan. Hayden Christiansen as Musician/Billy/Dylan? would probably have gotten his ass kicked by most any of the Dylans in He's Not There, maybe even the little black kid.
In the film, Warhol freaks out when his It girl gets anywhere near a headline with her and its all downhill for Edie after that. The infamous sex scenes are probably some of the finest seventies style sex with actors, but it doesn't convince me that these two lame-os actually had a relationship despite what the Edie character keeps babbling. Ultimately, it is for the sex and the defamation lawsuit that Dylan threatened that this creepy Harvey Weinstein studioed biomess will be noted for.
Tokyo Ga
This turned out to be a most excellent solution for the last film of the year. It was one of Wim Wenders' essay films from the eighties, a meditation on on Ozu and Japan. It is a visual song to Ozu and to 1983 Tokyo.
One of my favorite moments is where he compares two shots of the same bar district that plays a prominent role in the world of Ozu. He shows a shot then reshows it again with the 50mm, the focal length of Ozu and he was right it became Ozu's world.
The magic of that lens, the mini tripods that were built by the man who was first Ozu's assistant who later became his cameraman, Yuhara Atsuta.
The imagery is often hypnotic, particularly the static shots that featured multiple forms of transportation and anything shot inside a car. Golf stadiums, pinchinko parlors, early video game archives, cemetaries, wax food model factories, and parks full of retro (DAs and bobby sox) rock and roll youths being American in the rain on a Sunday are all shown by Wenders (who was also the sound man using his Sony Walkman) and cameraman Ed Lachman. In this film, Wenders creates a wonderful homage to Ozu, but more so, you see an awed German artist at nearly forty acting as a kind of visual Toqueville looking for clues of understanding this bright and shiny city in a country of fellow lost and fallen, nearly a full lifetime of his ago.
Here is a lift of two of the best sequences in the film of Tokyo involving their famous and famously noisy pinchinko parlors:
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:00 PM
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