Counterforce

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.”

-Jean- Luc Godard.

Marco Sparks and August Bravo consider themselves to be armchair cinemaphiles, probably just like yourself, but they’re just more arrogant (and sometimes, more knowledgeable) about it than you. But like every good poor man’s film critic, they regard the Criterion Collection with the highest of regard because, well, how can you not? Some of the world’s finest cinema in just about every genre is collected there, meant for the true lovers of film. And for the idiots. And any and all between. But sometimes, just sometimes, you come across a film that’s excellent and you have to ask yourself, “Why isn’t this in the Criterion Collection?” Join us as we do a little bit of that ourselves.

August Bravo: Blow-Up, 1966, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The best kind of movie is the one with no real ending. This movie is exactly that. Blow-Up (or Blowup) follows a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings. After taking pictures one night he wants to take those and publish it into an art book. Whilst living his daily life in swinging London he comes across a beautiful park with a beautiful couple in it. He photographs them. The film makes it almost seem he’s done something like this before. Photograph couples unknowingly, I mean. After getting the sufficient photos, he leaves and notices himself being stalked by none other than the woman from the pictures he was taking in the park. Her reaction to him taking pictures is what spirals the movie into something entirely different. It’s a very quiet and slow film. You almost wait for the exact moment where everything catapults into something action packed, but it doesn’t. Not to me, anyway. What movies this movie is the two girls that want to get their pictures taken earlier in the film. Why put these girls in the movie? That’s something I think about endlessly with films. Why did the writer put this in the script? What importance did these two innocent, young girls have? Also something you need to find out for yourself. The cover may give it away, but it may not. I was reminded of this film a couple of years back while watching a movie called Cache, or “Hidden” in French, directed by Michael Haneke (of Funny Games fame). I got the same unusual feeling I got at the end of that movie as I did with this one. Yes, I realize thsi movie is a bit pretentious, once again to me, anyway, but very well deserving of criterion status. Although, it is no Fool’s Gold.

Marco Sparks: I like how you threw in Fool’s Gold there, FTW. But, damn straight Blow-Up should be a criterion classic. They’ve done a wonderful job with Antonioni’s L’Avventura and L’Eclisse and they should definitely expand to his other films like this or even Red Desert or Zabriskie Point (by now it has to be worthy of crazy cult status, right?) or even La Notte, the middle film in the unofficial trilogy that L’Avventura and L’Eclisse bookend. Also, Cache. An excellent mention there, Mr. Bravo. A great film. The kind of movie that would probably leave Hitchcock unsettled.

But for my first selection: Blissfully Yours, 2002, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

This oddly lovely Thai romance film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (but you can call him “Joe,” like his friends and critics do, since there’s a Thai tradition of adopting nicknames rather than hearing people butcher their long names) is a bit of a weird pick for this, I know. But that is why I picked it. No description of the plot will do it justice since it’s literally about the love affair of a man and a woman, and the slightly older woman who’s jealous of them (and there’s lots of sex), but more so than plot, this is a mood piece. A tonal work if ever there was one. One thing I like about the Criterion collection is not just that they’ve expanded a lot of people’s knowledge and ideas about film to include foreign disciplines, but they’ve also shown you that film as art doesn’t always have to have a ridiculously complex plot, nor be a life or death matter. How one judges life and death is different from person to person, the same with the art we love and appreciate. With that in mind, I would definitely include this film by Joe, or perhaps his first film, Mysterious Object At Noon, a half documentary, half neature narrative exploration of the exquisit corpse party game.

August: La Dolce Vita, 1960, directed by Federico Fellini.

What Fellini movie shouldn’t be made into a Criterion classic? Well, a few, but this isn’t one of them. I prefer 8 1/2, but as most, or maybe just some of you know, that’s already in the collection. The title literally translates into “The Sweet Life,” this movie offers you insight on the life of the famous. Anita Ekberg gives a dashing performance as Sylvia. And Marcello Mastroianni is always riveting. Spawning probably  one of the most famous phrases, “paparazzi,” named after Marcello’s friend Paparazzo, a photographer of stars. This movie shows the life of a reporter, who’s just trying to find a meaning for life. After many flings with a great many women he’s still left confused. The endingis one of the best I’ve ever seen. With almost no structure, the film is probably meant to confuse the shit out of everyone, an initial reaction that Fellini probably not only expected but counted on. As probably one of the most imaginative directors there were, I’m sure he had many reasons to make this the way he did. And I wouldn’t change a thing.

Marco: Well said. The previous releases of this film were quite nice, but they do deserve that extra little Criterion stamp of approval. It’s so weird to see so much of our contemporary society still so familiar with the world of 1960′s Italy, and yet there it is. And as for the ending, which is brilliant, this film reminds me a great deal of Seinfeld in that sometimes in nothing we can find everything. Fellini was certain man who had issues with woman, and his career was all about that, being in love and in war with those issues and those women. I can’t help but think of “Asa Nisi Masa,” the words that make the pictures move.

For my next pick: The Passenger, 1975, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

When I tell you that I’m an Antonioni fan, you’ll understand that I’m serious. It’s no joke, it’s the real deal. I could talk for hours about this film and I could talk your ears off, but what I’ll say here instead is that I’ve done a lot of reading on the filmography of this director, and this period in his life was especially interesting. Around this time, Antonioni was trying to capture a certain feeling, to make a certain idea of his come to life. You can see it in the scripts that he wrote right before this, the films that never came to life and eventually evolved into this project, also called Professione: Reporter, starring Jack Nicholsonson and Maria Schneider. Antonioni was desperate to tell the story of a man so lost that he hoped to find himself and who would just keep going until he got there. Or somewhere. The title here takes on a different meaning altogether due to one cast members’ refusal to any driving in the film, thus switching roles in an interesting way.

August: Trainspotting, 1996, directed by Danny Boyle.

Don’t we all just need one more fucking hit? I do. So does Ewan MacGregor. I don’t know what first brought me to watch this movie. Maybe you, Peanut? Regardless, this is one of my favorite films. It starts off with some junkies, literally willing to inject/do anything to get get high. Sounds like a lot of people I know. Renton (played by MacGregor), or Rents, as everyone likes to call him is the focus of the film. After trying to quit, he goes through a tumultuous journey where he gets back on and off the heroin wagon. But heroin isn’t what this movie is all about. It’s about life. It’s about trying to be somebody, kind of. One can’t go on their entire life being a junkie, which is why Rents quits in the first place.

The fact actually made it’s way into the halls of Criterion on laserdisc, but I only mention that because what the fuck is a laserdisc and who the fuck cares? It’s got some positive reinforcement as it shows Rents actually succeeding in life. But it just comes to a crashing stop, ultimately showing you that you can quit a drug, but you can’t quit your friends. A lot of this movie is about growing up, especially towards the end. That sounds reasonable that the growing up takes place in the second half of the movie, yes, but this isn’t your ordinary drug film. Or any film. Probably one of my favorite soundtracks ever as well. The score leaves a lasting effect on how you perceive this movie and it’s characters.

Marco: for my last pick today, I give you Visitor Q, 2001, directed by Takashi Miike.

There’s a lot of cinema from Asia that I would suggest here, including Oldboy, which is soon to be remade here in America, Last Life In The Universe, Miike’s own Audition, Battle Royale, and probably even Lust, Caution. And that’s not even to mention the other fine foreign movies that didn’t make the list here just because of space such as Amores Perros and A Clockwork Orange.

But I picked Visitor Q for a lot of reasons. Firstly, when it’s all said and done, this is a good movie. But that gets lost in just how fucked up it is (it is Miike, after all). This is a film that starts incestuous sex and ends with a man and a young woman being breastfed by their wife/mother. In between those two points you get a lot of violence, sex, drug use, and necrophilia. But it all ties together (not so much nicely, but semi-completely) in a message about maternal nurturing and what it takes to heal a broken down family. But let me put it this way, if it’s content was toned down and this was released forty years ago in either Italy or France, it’d already be a known classic just hanging off the lips of scholars, not just cinematic perverts like you and me. But still, you ponder, too risque for the Criterion collection? Well, they did put out a version of Salò, didn’t they? And after you’ve released an art film with people eating shit in it, well… you can release a lot of different kinds of art after that, I’d imagine.

Okay, that’s enough from us for today. We decided to break this down into two posts, foreign and domestic, so tomorrow or perhaps the next day we’ll bring this a little closer to home. Until then…

STAY TUNED!