-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --
Knock Down the House (dir. Rachel Lears, 2019)
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Fly-on-the-wall documentary Knock Down the House easefully navigates the rising careers of four, blooming Democrats – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (of New York, 14thdistrict), Amy Vilela (of Nevada), Cori Bush (of Missouri) and Paula Jean Swearengin (of West Virginia). It is a fascinating, female response to Trump-era politics, reassuring trust in a fighting, future spirit. Lears tracks the progress of each candidate – their individual traits, motivations and growing public forums – trading between the intimate (one-to-one interviews, glancing into bathroom rituals) and the distant (often peering from the back of a stage). It is foremost reportage, an unbiased stance without any need to resist the opinions of its quartet; nonetheless, it is hard not feel that it is yet another example of a brand of documentary filmmaking that is becoming increasingly familiar, or perhaps fashionable, to the current, tele-oriented age of viewership. Knock Down The House is excellent and emotive, but its documentation feels superficial, unopinionated and just a little flat.
F For Fake, “Vérités et Mensonges” (dir. Orson Welles, 1974)
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“Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery and fraud, about lies,” intones Orson Welles, so commencing the sparkling and intelligent charm of his penultimate work. Welles playfully traces the nature of illusion, stepping between figures such as Elmyr de Hory (a highly-prosperous art forger) and Clifford Irving (the notorious forger of Howard Hughes’ diary), before landing on the story of Picasso’s ‘22-piece muse’, Kodar – luminously performed by Oja Kodar. Considered the precursor to modern film editing, the creative geography of F For Fake is at once essayistic and again improvisational, a somewhat autobiographical pastiche of film and its visual construction. One wonders how Welles could have ever made another film afterwards; not unlike what Finnegans Wake represented to James Joyce – the act of reinvention pushed to its farthest limit – we see the artist moving beyond their work, perhaps for the first time, unable to respond to their medium in the same way again. Welles ends the picture by reporting: ‘art, [Picasso] said, is a lie — a lie that makes us realize the truth. To th[is] memory […] I offer my apologies and wish you all, true and false, a very pleasant good evening’, a poignant, cinematic gesture of valediction.
Gerry (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2002)
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Somewhere, in a remote, unnamed location marked only “Wilderness Trail”, two young boys called Gerry, respectively, wander across a desert and get lost, unable to recover their way in the vast, minimalist infinite of their landscape. (review continues in separate piece)
That Obscure Object of Desire, “Cet obscure objet du désir” (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1977)
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Over the course of a train journey from Seville to Paris, an ageing, French philanthropist recollects the various scenes of his ill-fated love affair with the virtuous, siren-like ‘Conchita’ – interchangeably played by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, a unique balance of personality temperatures – despite not being aware of her presence aboard the train itself. Unknowingly, it would be Buñuel’s final, directorial effort, completing career-long preoccupations with sexuality, the dynamics between masculinity and femininity, as well his explosive, surrealist roots. Look once, and you see a film about two quarrelling people; look twice, and you quickly slip into the imagination of a genius.
Paranoid Park (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2007)
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Van Sant’s follow up to his ‘death-trilogy’ – Gerry, Elephant and Last Days – harnesses the same cinematic grammar and tropes of childhood, only now weaker in its deliverance onto the screen. Paranoid Park evolves as a metonym for the death of a security guard, (whose killing is revealed late into the film) and the subsequent disorientation felt by Alex, its skateboarding-protagonist. ‘No one’s ever really ready for Paranoid Park,’ one character tells us, a place where ‘dead bodies [are reportedly] buried […] under the cement’. Such mythology is poised against that of its ordinariness, straightforward scenes of skateboarding indulged with half-blurred, slow-motion effect, often accompanied by a Terrence Malick-esque voiceover. Near to the end, Alex is persuaded by a friend, Macy, to write a letter detailing the events of the story – the epistolary material is destroyed, however, leaving the film open, indecisive and lacking the final, emotional punch.
Last Days (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2005)
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If asked to consider an equivalent to Last Days– a loose interpretation of the final days of Kurt Cobain – I would be drawn to Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur, mapping the spiritual collapse of its worn-out, alcoholic protagonist, or, alternately, the melancholic fragility of Jeff Buckley’s first album, Grace. Last Days is also a response to unhappiness, one that we cannot help but find ourselves drawn to – not unlike the public response to Cobain’s suicide itself (in the years since, you can now purchase clothing with his suicide note printed on the front). Newly-escaped from rehab, the character/alter-ego of Blake roams freely in the rooms and nearby woods of a country house, either mock-shooting the sleeping guests with a shotgun, playing the guitar, or crashing through the quiet outdoors in his depressed solitude. In an early scene, Blake watches a high-speed train travel past him, perfectly capturing how out of sync he is from the rest of the world, or, perhaps, the indifference felt toward him by a world so close – such as those who crash and have sex in the rooms of the house. Van Sant crafts a portrait of the fading colours of youth, a life emptied out in front of us.
The Last Waltz (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1978)
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Scorsese meticulously crafts the “farewell concert appearance” of ‘The Band’, performed on November 25, 1976, with a plethora of additional musicians and guests. Close-up to medium shots are poised against the infrequent long shot, whilst interspersed with interview footage – studio segments, smoky reminiscences from members of the ‘The Band’, or the odd game of pool – the dynamic cadence of the stage softened, mourned perhaps, by the reality of their diminished collective. Lead guitarist Robbie Robertson, considering whether the concert is a beginning or an end, settles on: “the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning.” Elegiac and rhapsodic.
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