Eccentric Flower:199905/movies till dawn
From Eccentric Flower
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may fifth (barely) movies till dawn I mention movies, and all sorts of movie talk suddenly comes up. Some of it was obviously due to my comments the other day, but some of it must have been coincidence. For example, I made a comment about not being able to walk out of movies - but surely that has very little to do with an unexpected rant from Kymm against The Road To Wellville. As I said, Kymm, I'm an easy sell - I like almost all movies - but even balancing for my skewed tastes, I think you're overreacting. Yes, the characters hammed it up. Have you read the book? I felt the characters were in character, given that T.C. Boyle's book often veers into the very broadest of satire - and many of the people he was satirizing were stranger than fiction to begin with. Kellogg was, if you'll pardon the pun, a first-class flake. Also a nut. Of course T.C.'s words are hard to film. He has a distinctive prose style that defies transposal. Nonetheless, I certainly didn't think the film was the ungodly mess a lot of people thought it was. Then again, I always thought Toys got a bum rap too, and that was your other example. I'm still waiting for someone to give me something to hate about that film. Sure, it was a cartoon. Wasn't it supposed to be? - - - Iain-Padraic says he can walk out on movies - although he admits that, like me, he tends to choose ones where it's fairly likely that he won't need to - but it's unclear if he's ever actually exercised the option. He says that he came pretty close when he saw The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover ... ... which gets pretty harrowing about the time they start boring into a child's abdomen. (At which point half the audience in the theater walked out, and of course, it didn't get anything like so difficult again until near the very end.) I have more arguments about this film! I replied: Which just goes to show you - I saw the film three times in the theatre and I have since seen it three more times on videotape. I think it's brilliant. Painful to watch, but that's part of the point. Actually, though, I have to disagree with your estimate. I always figured Greenaway put the s**t-eating scene (a minor character is force-fed dog droppings as a punishment thought up by the film's sadistic villain) at the very beginning for a reason - if you can sit through the first five minutes, you can sit through all of it. And even in the first five minutes - after the horror of that scene, the cook comes and soothes the poor victim; the wife has exercised compassion but had it stifled; we know who all our players are, and can even - knowing Greenaway's moral streak, which is quite severe in its way - know who will have suffered, who will have died by the end. All sins are punished in proportion to the offense. It could almost be a morality play. Can you tell I like this film? But even I admit it is hard to watch. Maybe the reason people couldn't stomach Michael Gambon in Toys was that they had seen him in this or in The Singing Detective first. Given that, yes, he does look rather like a parody of himself. Oh, and Iain agreed with the morality play part completely. - - - I got a fair amount of mail thanking me for coming out of the closet about Phantom Menace Backlash. Apparently there were a whole bunch of people in that closet with me. That's the problem with closets - it's too dark to see who your friends are. I also got an interesting comment from Erik on one of the problems I had with The Matrix: I actually thought that the Agent's angry commentary to Fishburne worked well.The way I read it was that he was a piece of relatively all-purpose software who was performing an "agent function," and more than that, he was "frustrated" and "confused" by the enormous inefficiency, irrationality and general informational messiness of human existence. (Scare quotes because I realize I'm anthropomorphizing vastly, but the film lent itself to a degree of that - you were encouraged to see the Agents as coldly computational entities, but with a limited range of emotional affect.) Once the resistance was crushed, the agent would be free to return to a more rational cybernetic meadow (to steal and radically recontextualize Richard Brautigan's phrase). I always respect someone who can use "recontextualize" with a straight face. Naw, Erik, I'm just teasing you. I think you're onto something there. This is supported by the idea that they show ordinary "citizens" morphing into Agents and assuming Agent duties at various times. So the Agent just wants to get back to a more normal life - if it can be called life. - - - Had enough film chatter? Can it be that there is such a thing? Oh, all right then. But you'll be sorry when I go back to whining about gender again.
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