art film

SLOW MACHINE: incomprehensibly engrossing

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Photo caption: Stephanie Hayes in SLOW MACHINE. Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Films.

Slow Machine dives enigmatically into paranoia. A 72-minute art film shot on 16mm and a very low budget, Slow Machine is surprisingly engrossing.

After a night of hard drinking, Swedish actress Stephanie (Stephanie Hayes) wakes up in an unfamiliar Queens apartment. She has been brought there for her safety by Gerard (Scott Shepherd), an NYPD counter intelligence officer.  It’s not his apartment, but one he uses for his work.

Stephanie is trying to get her bearings and assess Gerard while he chatters amiably, describing himself as “emotionally promiscuous”. Gerard has a rare quality – he is loquacious without being tiresome – you can’t help but listen to guy. He is transparently mysterious, if that’s a thing.

Despite initial resistance, Stephanie becomes involved with Gerard. Then an unexpected event causes Stephanie to hide out at an acquaintance’s house.

Stephanie has found herself in a paranoid mystery, but she’s mysterious herself. Shifting between accents, she often sounds like she is fabricating. She deflects men’s passes with practiced moxie, but she can be paralyzed with terror.

The story is not the point. Slow Machine draws us in as we try to figure out who these people are and what is going on.

There are lots of unexpected nuggets. Chloe Sevigny shows up and plays a version of herself. Gerard’s unseen fiance is an anthropologist studying the setups in porn movies. A touch football game breaks out. Stephanie rehearses with Gerard for an audition, and the scene becomes riveting.

Slow Machine is the first feature for co-directors Joe Denardo and Paul Felten; Felten wrote the screenplay. 

Slow Machine is not for folks who need their movies to be linear or even coherent. Why is this movie so engrossing? Beats me, but it is seductive and ever watchable.

Slow Machine is streaming on Virtual Cinema, I saw it at Laemmle, and it’s coming to the Roxie.

Stephanie Hayes in SLOW MACHINE. Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Films.

on TV: THE GREAT BEAUTY – decadence, stunning imagery and the beauties of Rome itself

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Toni Servillo (center) in THE GREAT BEAUTY

On Sunday, November 29, Turner Classic Movies will air The Great Beauty (La grande belleza), which begins as its protagonist Gep Gambardella is celebrating his 65th birthday in a feverishly hedonistic party. Gep authored a successful novel in his twenties, which has since allowed him the indulgent life of a celebrity journalist, bobbing from party to party among Rome’s shallow rich.

Gep is having a helluva time, but now he reflects on the emptiness of his milieu and the superficial accomplishments of his past 40 years. As he alternates introspection and indulgence, we follow him through a series of strikingly beautiful Roman settings. (And, because Gep parties all night, we see lots of gorgeously still Roman dawns.)

The Great Beauty is foremost an extraordinarily beautiful art film. If you’ve been to Rome, you know that it is a generally chaotic city with unexpected islands of solitude. The Great Beauty captures this aspect of the Eternal City better than any other film I’ve seen. On one level, The Great Beauty is very successful Rome porn.

THE GREAT BEAUTY

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino also explores the moral vacuity of the very rich and the party life. It’s the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi, whom Sorrentino blames for enabling a national culture of escapism. These themes, along with the main character and the movie’s structure are of course nearly identical to Fellini’s great La Dolce Vita (1960), but The Great Beauty is more accessible, funnier and a bit more hopeful – and much more of a showcase for the cityscape of Rome. Sorrentino provides plenty of laughs, especially with a gourmet-obsessed cardinal and a cadaverous celebrity nun with a Mephistopheles-looking handler.

It’s hard to imagine an actor better suited to play Gep than Toni Servillo. Servillo perfectly captures both the happiness Gep takes in carnal pleasure and his self-criticism for giving his entire life to it. Servillo’s Gep is brazenly proud of his own cynicism, until we see his humanity breaking through at a funeral. Servillo is even magnificent in wearing Gep’s impressive collection of sports jackets.

There’s so much to The Great Beauty – stunning imagery, introspection, social criticism, sexual decadence, fine performances, humor and a Rome travelogue – each by itself worth watching the film.  The Great Beauty won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. If you miss it on TCM, you can still stream it from Amazon, Apple TV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, kanopy and the Criterion Channel. Courtesy of the Criterion Channel, here’s a illustrative clip.

https://youtu.be/d5fT3vaJE5k

SHE DIES TOMORROW: you have not seen this before

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Kate Lyn Sheil in SHE DIES TOMORROW

Writer-director Amy Seimetz’s offbeat fable She Dies Tomorrow is difficult to categorize, except as completely original and unlike anything we’ve seen before.

At first, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on, as we follow Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), who recently has bought a house and is ready to embark on a fling with Craig (Kentucker Audley). But then Amy has an epiphany – she’s going to die tomorrow. No, she hasn’t decided to kill herself – she just is, for lack of a better word, prophesying that something will cause her death tomorrow. That’s pretty heavy and, as anyone would, she becomes fixated on her impending mortality.

Of course, it’s also absurd. How can anyone predict the date of her own natural or accidental death? But here’s where things really get crazy. Amy tells her geeky chemist friend Jane (Jane Adams), and afterward, Jane is convinced that she, also, will die tomorrow. Jane, in her pajamas, crashes the dinner party of her brother Jason (Chris Messina) and unloads her realization. Soon, Jason, his wife and their two guests have been “infected” – and become dazed by the belief that they, too, will die tomorrow. Virus-like, the phenomenon spreads to a seemingly well-grounded doctor (Josh Lucas), a poolside slacker (Michelle Rodriguez) and others.

And here’s another absurdity – how can a psychological disorder (if that’s what this is) be instantly contagious? She Dies Tomorrow is unrelentingly deadpan, so the absurdism is morbidly comic. Each character reacts differently to his/her infection, and this can be pretty funny. Some are profoundly distraught, while one dumps the boyfriend she has found tiresome. Amy’s own ordering of a very special leather jacket is especially perverse.

For all the humor (and this is not guffaw-producing humor), She Dies Tomorrow is also one scary movie. Of all the genres it touches, it is probably closest to horror.

The entire cast is very good. Sheil and Audley starred in Seimetz’s swampy neo-noir Sun Don’t Shine.

For good reason, film critics boost films that break the mold, and She Dies Tomorrow has an Metacritic score of 80. John DeFore wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, “Movies like this are why art houses exist.”

She Dies Tomorrow is available on all the major streaming services.

Stream of the Week: THE GREAT BEAUTY – decadence, stunning imagery and the beauties of Rome itself

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As The Great Beauty (La grande belleza) begins, its protagonist Gep Gambardella is celebrating his 65th birthday in a feverishly hedonistic party. Gep authored a successful novel in his twenties, which has since allowed him the indulgent life of a celebrity journalist, bobbing from party to party among Rome’s shallow rich. Gep is having a helluva time, but now he reflects on the emptiness of his milieu and the superficial accomplishments of his past 40 years. As he alternates introspection and indulgence, we follow him through a series of strikingly beautiful Roman settings. (And, because Gep parties all night, we see lots of gorgeously still Roman dawns.)

The Great Beauty is foremost an extraordinarily beautiful art film. If you’ve been to Rome, you know that it is a generally chaotic city with unexpected islands of solitude. The Great Beauty captures this aspect of the Eternal City better than any other film I’ve seen. On one level, The Great Beauty is very successful Rome porn.

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino also explores the moral vacuity of the very rich and the party life. It’s the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi, whom Sorrentino blames for enabling a national culture of escapism. These themes, along with the main character and the movie’s structure are of course nearly identical to Fellini’s great La Dolce Vita (1960), but The Great Beauty is more accessible, funnier and a bit more hopeful – and much more of a showcase for the cityscape of Rome. Sorrentino provides plenty of laughs, especially with a gourmet-obsessed cardinal and a cadaverous celebrity nun with a Mephistopheles-looking handler.

It’s hard to imagine an actor better suited to play Gep than Toni Servillo. Servillo perfectly captures both the happiness Gep takes in carnal pleasure and his self-criticism for giving his entire life to it. Servillo’s Gep is brazenly proud of his own cynicism, until we see his humanity breaking through at a funeral. Servillo is even magnificent in wearing Gep’s impressive collection of sports jackets.

There’s so much to The Great Beauty – stunning imagery, introspection, social criticism, sexual decadence, fine performances, humor and a Rome travelogue – each by itself worthwatching the film.  The Great Beauty won the Best Foreign Language Oscar and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Cinequest: 40 DAYS OF SILENCE

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40 DAYS OF SILENCE
40 DAYS OF SILENCE

In the Uzbek drama 40 Days of Silence, a teenage Tajik girl undertakes a ritual vow of silence for forty days.  The mystery for a non-Tajik or -Uzbek audience is why she would do this?   And, we wonder, what is going to happen?

These questions are not answered definitively in 40 Days of Silence, but we sense that the stakes are life and death.  The girl’s progress is related dreamily, and it’s not always clear what is happening – or whether it is really happening.

The most outstanding aspect of 40 Days of Silence is its sound design, a collection of noises not EXACTLY music, but musical in effect.

40 Days of Silence is slow but mesmerizing.  It works as an art film, but is not for audience members that are uncomfortable with ambiguity.

Cinequest: Happenings of the Eighth Day

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happeningsThe extremely trippy Happenings of the Eighth Day is a pure art film, for better and for worse.  It consists of some live action sketches wedged into some moody montages of characters driving around or walking on the beach and lots of evocative snippets of file footage and news photos. The sketches often center around a movie-within-a-movie and are tongue-in-cheek funny.  The fourth wall is often broken, with the script tossed into and out of scenes and, most hilariously, when the boom lowers into a scene and then the sound guy himself sits down with the actors.  The iconic movie images range from the pioneering silent The Kiss to Fritz the Cat.  There are very graphic and provocative film clips from the Holocaust, 9/11, Sarajevo and other horrors.

Some random comments:  There’s a frequent use of video insets.  Happenings employs the handheld background used famously in the Danish The Five Obstructions (see photo below).  Even by Hollywood standards, the actresses were merely ornamental.

Happenings isn’t about a conventional narrative, so what’s going on here? Writer/director/actor/cinematographer/co-editor/actor Arya Ghavamian says that the theme is the oppression which he felt in his boyhood Iran and continues to feel in American society, a feeling he describes as “consistent paranoia”.  Hmmm.

Here’s my ambivalence:  With its humor, vivid imagery and driving music, Happenings almost worked for me as eye candy.  But the clash between the smirking characters and the images of real atrocities seemed exploitative, and it put me off.  Now, if you buy into Ghavamian’s explicit intention – a contemplation of oppression – the atrocity shots are justified, but I didn’t find that message coherent, nor did I think that it fit within the appealing overall slyness of the film.  But, with the exception of a couple sketches that ran on too long and some moments that were annoying or offensive, I found it pretty entertaining.

Happenings of the Eighth Day is a VERY low-budget film, and its sound is particularly bad and its editing is particularly good.

I saw Happenings of the Eighth Day at its World Premiere at Cinequest in the San Jose Repertory Theatre and, I’ve got to say, no premiere in the history of cinema could have been any closer to its filming locations.  The San Jose Rep is on the Paseo de San Antonio and 75% of the movie’s exteriors were shot along the Paseo from the Cesar Chavez fountains and the Fairmont Hotel past the Post Office to The Movie Gourmet’s own personal bench between Philz Coffee and the Tangerine salon. A former Philz barrista even appears in the film.

happenings2

 

The Great Beauty: decadence, stunning imagery and the beauties of Rome itself

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As The Great Beauty (La grande belleza) begins, its protagonist Gep Gambardella is celebrating his 65th birthday in a feverishly hedonistic party.  Gep authored a successful novel in his twenties, which has since allowed him the indulgent life of a celebrity journalist, bobbing from party to party among Rome’s shallow rich.  Gep is having a helluva time, but now he reflects on the emptiness of his milieu and the superficial accomplishments of his past 40 years.  As he alternates introspection and indulgence, we follow him through a series of strikingly beautiful Roman settings.  (And, because Gep  parties all night, we see lots of gorgeously still Roman dawns.)

The Great Beauty is foremost an extraordinarily beautiful art film. If you’ve been to Rome, you know that it is a generally chaotic city with unexpected islands of solitude.  The Great Beauty captures this aspect of the Eternal City better than any other film I’ve seen.  On one level, The Great Beauty is very successful Rome porn.

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino also explores the moral vacuity of the very rich and the party life. It’s the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi, whom Sorrentino blames for enabling a national culture of escapism.  These themes, along with the main character and the movie’s structure are of course nearly identical to Fellini’s great La Dolce Vita (1960), but The Great Beauty is more accessible, funnier and a bit more hopeful – and much more of a showcase for the cityscape of Rome.  Sorrentino provides plenty of laughs, especially with a gourmet-obsessed cardinal and a cadaverous celebrity nun with a Mephistopheles-looking handler.

It’s hard to imagine an actor better suited to play Gep than Toni Servillo.  Servillo perfectly captures both the happiness Gep takes in carnal pleasure and his self-criticism for giving his entire life to it.  Servillo’s Gep is brazenly proud of his own cynicism, until we see his humanity breaking through at a funeral.  Servillo is even magnificent in wearing Gep’s impressive collection of sports jackets.

There’s so much to The Great Beauty – stunning imagery, introspection, social criticism, sexual decadence, fine performances, humor and a Rome travelogue – each by itself worth a visit to the theater.  The Great Beauty, which will be one of the favorites for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, may not be in theaters for very long – catch it while you can.

Museum Hours: visual and intellectual, but meh

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Critics love the artsy Museum Hours (it has a Metacritic rating of 83), in which a Canadian woman visits Vienna and meets a museum guard;  I found it intellectually interesting but not emotionally compelling.  The museum guard sits behind a velvet rope all day watching visitors peruse the oil paintings; he passes his time with mental games, like counting the eggs depicted in the paintings or imagining the museum patrons without their clothes.  The woman’s last surviving relative, a cousin whom she has not seen in years, has become comatose and she feels obligated to visit her.

We piece together the essence of the characters from nuggets in the screenplay.  The man managed unsuccessful rock bans in his youth, is gay, lost his partner along the way and now isolates himself by spending his free time on the Internet.  The woman, who gets by with a series of part-time, dead-end jobs, is also socially isolated.  They strike up a platonic friendship.

Here’s the interesting part – director Jem Cohen has filled the film with visually arresting shots of the bleak parts of Vienna, sometimes in direct juxtaposition with the artworks in the museum, allowing us to contemplate composition, subject and colors.  In the middle of the film, a docent engages a tour group in a provocative discussion of Breugel.

That’s all fine, but it doesn’t make for much entertainment.  There’s not much story, and the characters, while interesting, are not in themselves enough to carry the 107 minutes.  Museum Hours is a worthy choice, but not a Must See, for art film devotees.

 

Upstream Color: “enigmatic” is an understatement

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UPSTREAM COLOR

I have never been as ambivalent about a movie as I am about Upstream Color.  (More about that later.)

A character named Thief concocts a drug from corpulent worms, doses a woman and scams her out of her savings.  Another character, named Sampler, deworms her in a surgical tent at a pig farm.  This experience washes away her memory, and she happens into a relationship with a man, another loner trying to move on from a traumatic episode.  Along the way, we see vividly colorful shots of the human bloodstream and riparian ecology.  Sampler periodically reappears to solemnly observe the goings on and experiment with sound recordings, and he spends lots of time with the herd of pigs.

Yes, this is one trippy movie.  The worming and deworming scenes could fit in a sci-fi or horror movie.  The second half has the air of a romantic thriller.  The overall tone is of an art film or experimental film.  Upstream Color is written, directed, produced and co-edited by Shane Carruth, who also plays the male lead and composed the score.  Indeed, the cinematography and Carruth’s editing and music are strikingly unique and effective.

Even viewers who admire Upstream Color find it baffling.  What’s going on and what’s it all mean?  Halfway through, I put it all together:  Sampler represented the writer himself who was imagining – and trying on – different characters, plot elements and settings.   So I thought this was a brilliant film about the creative process.  But then Carruth himself set me straight.  At the screening Q & A, Carruth said that I was wrong about Sampler, that the film is about how people might relate if their identities are stripped away, and that Upstream Color is intended to be a coherent narrative.

So here’s my problem –  it’s not a coherent narrative – not even close.  If Sampler is merely an observer, how can he play a critical part in the plot by deworming the woman?  Why are the characters doing the same thing simultaneously at the pig farm and in the highrise? And what gives with the bearded guy and his wife (seemingly unrelated to the other plot threads)?  So I don’t think that Upstream Color is a success on the filmmaker’s own stated terms.  But my interpretation did work for me, and the music, visuals, editing, and lead actress Amy Seimetz combined to make the overall experiece worthwhile.

Amy Seimetz is excellent as this haunted and confused character.  (Seimetz is a director in her own right and is getting enough acting parts now to demonstrate that she has the chops of a potentially significant actress.  (BTW 25 years ago, Lindsay Crouse would have played this role.)

If you like your movies understandable, stay away from Upstream Color – you will hate it.  If you want a unique art film experience, go with it.