TGIFF: Volume 1
THE SCOOP
Walter Meego: Chicago-based dance/pop duo, Justin Sconza and Colin Yarck
Latest Album: Voyager
Think: Daft Punk + Beatles + Air
Let Them Eat Marzipan!
Flasks with Cosmo: checked
Vivienne Westwood ripoff from Forever 21: checked
BGF (Best Gay Friend/Freak): checked
After letting the boys have their fun last week, the girls are waiting anxiously for the next wave of nostalgia hitting the big screen, and this weekend isn’t going to be that much of a difference: same level of expectations (as low as one can hope for). I guess there’s much to be celebrated about your beloved characters reaching middle age or passing over that hill, from Indy Jones to Samantha of the Fab Four. Or maybe one is secretly mourning and laughing at the same consecutive years spent investing in fiction, and the number of years to come, waiting for that fiction to ripen as realistically as one’s own face, hands, and legs. Our mortality relieved of its final destination if our fantasy take the first step ahead for us. Then again, a popular phenomenon like Gossip Girl performs the opposite effect for the younglings, keeping the cosmopolitan allure but amping up the bitchiness. I bet the same audience who enjoyed SATC became easy converts to the adolescent drama. Interesting though that the core of both shows preaches the everlasting bonds of friendship over guys and luxury.
But while most critics saved their acerbic barbs against SATC’s exuberant display of elite materialism and faux feminism, what’s more concealed as the larger fantasy is this “interminable bind” between our girlfriends. It’s as if that’s the sacred subject we deem to be (at least) real in this dreamland NYC, not love for labels (though that is true), but love for our friends even as we’re searching for love of a romantic nature. Yet, reality offers an less ideal picture, people come and go, problems erupt, distractions emerge, convenience a reliable glue to safeguard memories too distant to remember and too lazy to search through Facebook.
Hilarious insights from my favorite critics on similar issues of repressed racial typecasting in SATC: If glamour is merely an artifact from the old Hollywood system, refurnished for modern palates, how about the stuff we choose to forget about that innocent era of cigarettes and martinis? (now I sound like Carrie, uggh)
Stephanie Zacharek: Because Carrie is a very busy, very successful, but very disorganized New York writer, she decides she needs an assistant. The woman she hires, Louise (Jennifer Hudson, who gives a likable, openhearted performance), turns out to be a godsend to her…But why make your only adult character of color a wise, capable servant girl? Carrie spends too much time beaming magnanimously at Louise. The effect, unintentional but not dismissible, is a kind of “Mammy, what would I ever do without you?” superiority. (Carrie also gives Louise, as a gift, one of the most hideous bags this side of colostomy paraphernalia.)
Ed Gonzalez: When Jennifer Hudson appears on screen in Sex and the City, the only sane way to respond to the Oscar-winning actress’s performance is with a Homer Simpson-esque shudder, not because Hudson can’t act—most people could tell you that from watching Dreamgirls, in which Hudson’s “soulful” singing was meant to distract (some might say successfully) from reality—but because the American Idol also-ran allows herself to be typecast as a modern-day mammy to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw.
To be continued…after tonight’s crazy-ass screening, listen to Fergie in the meantime.
Our eyes were watching them
In anticipation of Steven Moffat’s two-parter installment for the BBC sci-fi series, Doctor Who this Saturday, I rewatched the episode that became not only a fan favorite, but the winner of the BAFTA award for best screenplay. The man who brought us the original romance series, Coupling, is able to tweak a family-friendly show and indulge our inner man-child with both cerebral brainteasers and emotional rollercoasters. If you happen to be a devoted fan of Doctor Who, a MOFFAT episode is the ice cream best served by itself, with the rest of the season being the unnecessary cherry on the top (especially those written by the executive producer, Russell Davies).
“Blink” is considered a doctor-lite episode that barely features the titular time-traveler himself, yet it focuses more on the consequences of time-traveling than the ones that do have the nerd-chic David Tennant in them. The monster of the week is a creepy rendition on Christian mythology, The Weeping Angels. Of course, they neither weep nor guard, but rather wait for you to blink in order to kill you. But again, murder is better served cold, so these “psychopaths are the only ones in the universe to kill you nicely. No mess, no fuss, they just zap you into the past and let you live to death. The rest of your life used up and blown away in the blink of an eye. You die in the past, and in the present they consume the energy of all the days you might have had, all your stolen moments. They’re creatures of the abstract. They live off potential energy.” If that’s a mouthful, just look at the wikipedia entry for better clarification and the elaborate paradox-heavy plotline.
I could go on and on about the wimey-blimey nature of time, but what’s actually more intriguing during my second viewing, are the very techniques of visualization in terms of suspense and genre conventions. Usually, in a “horror” film, the viewer has the privilege of sight, while the character must suffer from the lack of hindsight. We are given the perspective of someone witnessing the crime, but are helpless to act or help our onscreen counterparts. Of course, most horror films have ransacked this dynamic into bits, but Blink manages to incorporate those horror traditions into the logic of its narrative, or more importantly, the morphology of the Weeping Angels. I’m not sure if Moffat or director, Hettie MacDonald even contemplated about the scopophillic implications of their work, since the unanimous praise has easily silenced these formal gestures as visual cop-outs, or else, the episode would have failed otherwise. As you can see from the screencaps below, the Weeping Angels are basically just stone statues, what’s so scary about that? Well, that’s just half of the story.
PEEKABOO…
I SEE YOU!
They are described are “quantum-locked,” which means if someone or something sees them, they changed into stone. We never see their “real forms” since they move quickly until of course, they are sighted. Phew. Rock solid, again. Therefore, the doctor advises us to “not blink, blink and you’re dead.”
This returns us back to the conundrum, due to the fact that we only see these creatures as statues throughout the whole episode. Yes, sometimes, we’re in the point of view of one of the human characters, but other times, we’re supposed to be in the omniscient role, watching everything and doing nothing. The camera does not exist! Or does it? Self-reflexivity can be awfully boring (see late period Godard for overkill), but “Blink” puts the META back into metamorphosis, of the angels that is from abstract absence to concrete objects of frightening presence. It’s the perfect example of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, we change what we see! Our viewing directly intervenes in the events of the episode. It’s not the “suspend my disbelief” example where Wonder Woman’s plane is invisible even as we see the white outlines around it (for our eyes only) since in this case, we look when the others are not working. We watch the watchers. Three examples below.
A: Character leaves the room.
B. Angel staring as the heroine leaves the house.
C. Heroine don’t see what we see.
Simultaneously, our sight parallels the blindspots endemic to the placement of the camera. In this scene, our heroine, Sally Sparrow, does not realize the statue behind her has moved its hands. Neither are we given the chance to witness the transformation due to our static positioning (and Sally blocking our view).
BEFORE:
AFTER:
Perhaps, the episode succeeds because of this added level of suspense, that we are kept in the dark about their true ontology as our presence is felt within a supporting role. In short, we see, but cannot touch; we change them into stone, but cannot yell “look behind you” to the poor victims. We’re like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window with the window being simply a TV screen.
Mummy, could I wear this for Halloween?
Class dismissed!
Congrats to Laurent Cantet’s Entre Les Murs (The Class) for winning the Palme d’Or and returning national pride back to France ever since 1987 , hope it comes to Telluride. I’m happy that Ceylan and the Dardennes received their consolation prizes as well. I think this was still a great year for CINEMA, since opinions were heavily divided rather than reaching some overrated consensus. It leaves the rest of the world waiting to become his/her own critic.
(Ryan Gosling to reprise his pedagogical persona if there happens to be an American remake?)
The Second Half of 2008:
The Quicktime trailer for Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will appear on the web in a few days, but those who went to see Indy 4 already got their Christmas gift early this year!
Another film I’m dying to see is The Good, The Bad, and The Weird (one of the later Out-of-Competition films), directed by Ji-Won Kim , whose two previous features, A Tale of Two Sisters, and A Bittersweet Life, were some of the best genre-benders I’ve seen in a long time…from familial horror to meditative gangster pic, and now a wacky “kimchi” western along the lines of Sergio Leone. Kim possesses a certain panache that’s never wildly excessive, yet it envelopes mundane source material with a sublime layer of terror and enchantment. Most of all, he’s a damn good interior designer.
(please let the whole video load before playing! Don’t know Korean? Well, just know that the titular characters appear in reverse order)
Cannes on the Small Screen
Thanks to Youtube, some of the latest films from the first half of Cannes ‘08 are now open to the non-journalist public eye, at least in their “trailer” form. Meg has already posted her bets, A Christmas Tale (w/French all-star cast) and Woody’s Vicky Christina Barcelona (w/much needed all-star cast).
Changeling aka The Exchange (dir. Clint Eastwood): 70s neo-noir with more maternal melodrama than Chinatown, Angelina already has dips on the Oscars noms.
Three Monkeys (dir. Nuri Ceylan Blige, or NBC for short): eagerly anticipated new film, with impressive cinematography and creepy imagery, luvs it.
Waltz with Bashir (dir: Ari Folman): This year’s Persepolis (and overall positive critical consensus)–personal memoirs, controversial war, and 80s dancing.
Gomorra (dir. Matteo Garrone) Move over FF Coppola, this is the Godfather made by Antonioni.
Two Lovers (dir. James Gray) After the dud that was We Own the Night, let’s see if Joaquin and Gwyneth can give Gray’s latest effort some genuine spark , plus who can say no to Isabella Rossellini.
Tokyo! (dir…look at each video for our eccentric TRIO): The perennial anthology love letter to one of the most photographic cities (and home to pale albino ghosts with scary long black hair)
Michel Gondry (spot his signature a mile away)
Leo Carax (love that sonic nod to Godzilla)
Boon Joon-ho (Is that The Host monster attacking their apartment?)
Tout est Parfait (dir. Yves Christian Fournier) Spoutblog Karina’s OUT OF COMPETITION recommendation, supposedly, the emotional soul to Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (or any of his recent experiments), about finding love in the midst of mass suicide. Cute shoegaze song at the end. 
End of Days
Burma disaster, rice shortage, child prodigy getting 87%, and now…the birth of this new blog…666, indeed.
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