Woo hoo! I knew this show would kick into gear eventually and in the last episode on the second disk, it did. The ice truck killer's identity is brilliant. What an appropriate occupation! And now Dexter's having real feelings, instead of convincing himself that he's an alien, the show can really become compelling and exciting.
I particularly liked the interplay of sex and making love and the real emotional intimacy required for the latter. It's tough, and rare. I'm surprised that women tossed Dexter after sleeping with him because he was emotionless. I've had a few hollow emotional relationships and I never booted someone for just fucking. It's nice to think that women have those standards and that awareness, but I doubt it's all that common.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Cat People ('82) % %
I rented it by accident. I meant to get the Val Lewton/Jacques Torneur 1942 Cat People.
This is not a great movie. It fails narratively, since there's no real sympathy for the blank Natasha Kinski, Irena, the main character who is discovering her deep secret, that she, like her brother and her parents before her, becomes a leopard when she gets sexually arroused. Even the director, Paul Schrader, has a hard time saying what the film is about. In the extras, there's an on set interview with him, in which he resists reducing the film to it's narrative, and then goes on to say that it's about myth and subconscious desires. This means that the film isn't traditionally engaging as entertainment, and it fails in exciting in a sexual or horror style as well. I didn't find it exciting, seductive or intellectually stimulating. He further can't really explain how he and Natasha created her character, which is because he didn't really create any engaging characters. In fact, Schraeder comes off as a creepy, over-intellectualized jack ass with no emotions or honest feelings. That's not to say that there aren't interesting and appealing aspects to the film.
The soundtrack is by Giorgio Moroder. It's awesome. And the theme song is sung by David Bowie, "Putting out a fire with gasoline". The cast includes Malcolm McDowell as Irena's murdering, incestuous brother; John Laroquette, Ruby Dee(A Raisin in the Sun), Frankie Faison (playing another cop) and Ed Bagely Jr in small but delightful roles.
The intro scenes involving the primal historical sacrifices are interesting in that they expose a pre-adolescent boy sexual fantasy, much like Conan the Barbarian. The theme of the movie is sexual imagination, according to the director, and it shows a fairly juvenile sexuality. But that can be fun sometimes. It's an amusing conceit that someone's sexuality can turn them into a murderous beast. But with the inclusion of the brother, it makes it less about feminine sexuality, and more about sexuality in general, and then it becomes too broad to really be all that exciting or engaging.
So blah. It had some cool spots, but I could have watched Ray on UPN for the second time, and been better off. But then again, there's alot of nudity in Cat People, and a very cool scene in the forest at night that's shot in black and white and colored in post. So it's got some neat stuff, but you don't need to watch the whole thing, and it feels like it could have ended three times over.
This is not a great movie. It fails narratively, since there's no real sympathy for the blank Natasha Kinski, Irena, the main character who is discovering her deep secret, that she, like her brother and her parents before her, becomes a leopard when she gets sexually arroused. Even the director, Paul Schrader, has a hard time saying what the film is about. In the extras, there's an on set interview with him, in which he resists reducing the film to it's narrative, and then goes on to say that it's about myth and subconscious desires. This means that the film isn't traditionally engaging as entertainment, and it fails in exciting in a sexual or horror style as well. I didn't find it exciting, seductive or intellectually stimulating. He further can't really explain how he and Natasha created her character, which is because he didn't really create any engaging characters. In fact, Schraeder comes off as a creepy, over-intellectualized jack ass with no emotions or honest feelings. That's not to say that there aren't interesting and appealing aspects to the film.
The soundtrack is by Giorgio Moroder. It's awesome. And the theme song is sung by David Bowie, "Putting out a fire with gasoline". The cast includes Malcolm McDowell as Irena's murdering, incestuous brother; John Laroquette, Ruby Dee(A Raisin in the Sun), Frankie Faison (playing another cop) and Ed Bagely Jr in small but delightful roles.
The intro scenes involving the primal historical sacrifices are interesting in that they expose a pre-adolescent boy sexual fantasy, much like Conan the Barbarian. The theme of the movie is sexual imagination, according to the director, and it shows a fairly juvenile sexuality. But that can be fun sometimes. It's an amusing conceit that someone's sexuality can turn them into a murderous beast. But with the inclusion of the brother, it makes it less about feminine sexuality, and more about sexuality in general, and then it becomes too broad to really be all that exciting or engaging.
So blah. It had some cool spots, but I could have watched Ray on UPN for the second time, and been better off. But then again, there's alot of nudity in Cat People, and a very cool scene in the forest at night that's shot in black and white and colored in post. So it's got some neat stuff, but you don't need to watch the whole thing, and it feels like it could have ended three times over.
INLAND EMPIRE % % % %
Baffling, as always, this is Lynch at his most unrestrained. Working without a completed script and in digital video, David Lynch bounds through various themes: Hollywood, violence, sex, interconnected times, mysteries of the night, suburban secrets, 50s pop culture, and just anything that might creep out a viewer. There's strobe lights at uneven paces, screams, blood red lighting effects, decay, alter-egos, doors through time and space, demented women running at the camera into a close-up and more awkward closeups. And more closeups. The light digital cameras enable super-close shots at slightly odd angles, and Lynch utilizes the most irritating of digital camera mistakes to his unique motives. He manipulates focus so that the background is in focus when the face in close-up is out of focus, contrary to expectations. It's a little unnerving, and suggests that no one is ever clearly known.
Following an introductory scene involving a couple enterring a hotel room, presumably a sexual/business relationship, in which both people's faces are blurred, the first hour or so is fairly linear, and surrounds Laura Dern's character, Nancy, an actress in Hollywood, married to a powerful and mysterious man. She meets her new neighbor, played by a standard Lynch actress, who is super weird and says that she cannot tell tomorrow from yesterday. She also tells an odd story about a boy who goes out to play and creates evil. Evil. Evil. It doesn't make sense at the time, and I kept hoping it would click with something else in the film, but I got nothing out of it. Nancy gets a new film role and the linear plot follows the making of the film, which concerns a couple who enter into an adulterous affair. Nancy begins to lose control over the difference between her life and the film, and this is where is all goes bananas.
Nancy goes through a metal door off of an alley, goes back in time to an earlier scene and then gets trapped in a fifties-ish coral living room. She explores the house and spends most of her time with a group of young women, sexually provocative and dimly lit. There's screaming and red lights, bright flashes and choreographed dancing to 50s pop songs. The film moves to Poland, where Nancy's husband is involved with an invisible woman and some old men. And then Dern, dirty and dishelveled, meets with a man in a dark room high in a dilapadated warehouse, where she discusses her past abusive relationships and the ways she's beaten the men she's escaped from. There's also a side-line involving Julia Ormond, who I haven't seen work in a while, who goes into a police station. She's disturbed and has been hypnotised by some man in a bar and told to stab someone with a screw driver, but she's already stabbed herself with it. Then later she reappears as the wife of the adulterer in Nancy's film, and again as the first crazy version, stalking dirty Dern on Hollywood Blvd. Here the young women from the house are now prostitutes but still snapping in time together. Dern gets stabbed, staggers past the stars on the boulevard and collapses next to some people sleeping on the street waiting for a bus to Pomona. Not to mention the interludes of sitcom style scenes about a family of rabbits who speak in odd sequiters, as if part of an absurdist play.
There's all sorts that I've left out. Some of which I can't recall because it didn't make sense to me and some of which, like the Beck song on the soundtrack and the burlesque club, that felt awkward to me because of their contemporary connections. It felt to me that there was too much freedom. It went on too long and in so many different directions. And the film retread a great many of Lynch's themes that it at times felt like a satire.
So I found it an interesting freak out, but it lacked the mysterious beauty of films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and the cohesive feeling of purpose of Lost Highway. I thought a few times around the two hour mark, that I would never indulge another filmmaker like I would Lynch, and with good reason. The dirty Dern was truly creepy, and the strange hallways leading to other places captured that archetypal mysterious feeling found in everyone's unconscious that brings me back to Lynch again and again.
Following an introductory scene involving a couple enterring a hotel room, presumably a sexual/business relationship, in which both people's faces are blurred, the first hour or so is fairly linear, and surrounds Laura Dern's character, Nancy, an actress in Hollywood, married to a powerful and mysterious man. She meets her new neighbor, played by a standard Lynch actress, who is super weird and says that she cannot tell tomorrow from yesterday. She also tells an odd story about a boy who goes out to play and creates evil. Evil. Evil. It doesn't make sense at the time, and I kept hoping it would click with something else in the film, but I got nothing out of it. Nancy gets a new film role and the linear plot follows the making of the film, which concerns a couple who enter into an adulterous affair. Nancy begins to lose control over the difference between her life and the film, and this is where is all goes bananas.
Nancy goes through a metal door off of an alley, goes back in time to an earlier scene and then gets trapped in a fifties-ish coral living room. She explores the house and spends most of her time with a group of young women, sexually provocative and dimly lit. There's screaming and red lights, bright flashes and choreographed dancing to 50s pop songs. The film moves to Poland, where Nancy's husband is involved with an invisible woman and some old men. And then Dern, dirty and dishelveled, meets with a man in a dark room high in a dilapadated warehouse, where she discusses her past abusive relationships and the ways she's beaten the men she's escaped from. There's also a side-line involving Julia Ormond, who I haven't seen work in a while, who goes into a police station. She's disturbed and has been hypnotised by some man in a bar and told to stab someone with a screw driver, but she's already stabbed herself with it. Then later she reappears as the wife of the adulterer in Nancy's film, and again as the first crazy version, stalking dirty Dern on Hollywood Blvd. Here the young women from the house are now prostitutes but still snapping in time together. Dern gets stabbed, staggers past the stars on the boulevard and collapses next to some people sleeping on the street waiting for a bus to Pomona. Not to mention the interludes of sitcom style scenes about a family of rabbits who speak in odd sequiters, as if part of an absurdist play.
There's all sorts that I've left out. Some of which I can't recall because it didn't make sense to me and some of which, like the Beck song on the soundtrack and the burlesque club, that felt awkward to me because of their contemporary connections. It felt to me that there was too much freedom. It went on too long and in so many different directions. And the film retread a great many of Lynch's themes that it at times felt like a satire.
So I found it an interesting freak out, but it lacked the mysterious beauty of films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and the cohesive feeling of purpose of Lost Highway. I thought a few times around the two hour mark, that I would never indulge another filmmaker like I would Lynch, and with good reason. The dirty Dern was truly creepy, and the strange hallways leading to other places captured that archetypal mysterious feeling found in everyone's unconscious that brings me back to Lynch again and again.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
The Lives of Others % % % % %
Brilliant screenplay! A story within a story, convincingly told in a grey communist block palate and a rigid, symmetrical mise-en-scene reminiscent of fascist architecture.
And the theme is the transformative power of art. The life of art transforms the most brainwashed, rigid, suppressed, government stooge into taking risks, acting passionately and laying his own well-being on the line for others.
And while this transformation is truly affecting, the man, a Stasi spy in East Berlin, does not completely transform. This isn't a sappy, childish fantasy. This is East Berlin. He sacrifices himself, his power in life, to enable another with more revolutionary potential power to continue on and to affect their society in a more liberating direction. But in becoming more courageous, he is stymied by his supervisors and the institution for which he works. East Germany falls, Berlin changes, and in the end he is too poor to be free or dramatically free-willed. He pushes on and that in itself is courageous.
And the theme is the transformative power of art. The life of art transforms the most brainwashed, rigid, suppressed, government stooge into taking risks, acting passionately and laying his own well-being on the line for others.
And while this transformation is truly affecting, the man, a Stasi spy in East Berlin, does not completely transform. This isn't a sappy, childish fantasy. This is East Berlin. He sacrifices himself, his power in life, to enable another with more revolutionary potential power to continue on and to affect their society in a more liberating direction. But in becoming more courageous, he is stymied by his supervisors and the institution for which he works. East Germany falls, Berlin changes, and in the end he is too poor to be free or dramatically free-willed. He pushes on and that in itself is courageous.
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