September 2015 - MDP Film Journal

Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947)

September was focused on trying to squeeze in as many noir and 2000s movies as I can before the end of the month, because October is all set for Hoop-tober! 2.0. I did make it to the theater and caught the new Mission: Impossible. Thoughts McQuarrie's entry in the franchise can be read here.

Best of August 2015
1.  Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947)
2.  Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947)  
3.  Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)
4.  The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)
5.  Gone in 60 Seconds (Dominic Sena, 2000)
6.  Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946)
7.  Spartan (David Mamet, 2004)
8.  Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952)
9.  Shooter (Antoine Fuqua, 2007)
10.  Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, 1947)

Favorite Rewatches of August 2015
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)
T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)
The Way of the Gun (Christopher McQuarrie, 2000)

Films watched in August: 24
Rewatches in August: 5
Total tally for 2015: 177

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

August 2015 - MDP Film Journal

By Player (Kaneto Shindô, 2000)

In August I really sat down and dug into my 2000s backlog, checking up on some movies I have been meaning to see for quite some time. It was nice to get out to the theater and Straight Outta Compton will likely make my end-of-year list (if I have even seen enough movies to compile one). It was fantastic.

Best of August 2015
1.  By Player (Kaneto Shindô, 2000)
2.  Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007)
3.  Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray, 2015)  
4.  Onibaba (Kaneto Shindô, 1964)
5.  Children of Hiroshima (Kaneto Shindô, 1952)
6.  Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ha, 2003)
7.  We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)
8. Tomorrow is Another Day (Felix E. Feist, 1951)
9. Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)

Favorite Rewatches of August 2015
Charlie Wilson's War (Mike Nichols, 2007)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003)
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2004)
Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000)

Films watched in August: 28
Rewatches in August: 9
Total tally for 2015: 153

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

July 2015 - MDP Film Journal

Los (James Benning, 2001)

July found me traveling to Alaska for some R&R at my in-laws house and beginning a new viewing project: a study of film noir. I have seen most of the main texts of the genre but have never spent the time to really get my mind around what the genre is and with any clarity or precision. I created a list to guide my genre viewing in that vein which can be found on my letterboxd. It is easy to see that Los Angeles continued to be a major theme of my viewing, as was a large part of the impetus behind the genre study.

With all the vacation time for movie watching, it was a very productive month of viewings.

Best of July 2015
1.  Los (James Benning, 2001)
2.  The Wolves (Kineto Shindô, 1955)
3.  Detective Story (William Wyler, 1951)
4.  Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)
5.  Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949)
6.  Union Station (Rudolph Maté, 1950)
7.  Crime Wave (André de Toth, 1954)
8.  La Petite Lise (Jean Grémillon, 1930)
9.  Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis, 2015)
10.  The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946)

Favorite Rewatches of July 2015
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)
Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)

Films watched in July: 24
Rewatches in July: 5
Total tally for 2015: 125

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

June 2015 - MDP Film Journal

The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

June found me traveling to Los Angeles for a week, the first time I've been to the city in my life. I didn't realize just how seminal the trip would be for me and how much I had internalized so many of the city's sites from the movies filmed there. Needless to say, I loved being there and, naturally, I took advantage of the city's many cinemas to catch up on some current movies (more than I would normally watch in a month). I had to pull out Los Angeles Plays Itself after I got back home. It is becoming a very important movie in my life.

Best of June 2015
1.  The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
2.  The Power of Nightmares (Adam Curtis, 2004)
3.  Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
4.  Ride with the Devil (Ang Lee, 1999)
5.  Love & Mercy (Bill Pohlad, 2014)
6.  The Overnight (Patrick Brice, 2015)

Favorite Rewatches of June 2015
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)
Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008)
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993)

Films watched in June: 20
Rewatches in June: 5
Total tally for 2015: 101

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

April/May 2015 - MDP Film Journal

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)

Lots of things going on and didn't get much time in for film. Hence, the combined April/May months.

Best of April/May 2015
1.  Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
2.  The Century of the Self (Adam Curtis, 2002)
3.  Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Kaneto Shindô, 1959)
4.  Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)
5.  Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
6.  Moonwalker (Jerry Kramer, Will Vinton, Jim Blashfield & Colin Chilvers, 1988)

Favorite Rewatches of April/May 2015
Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004)
Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998)
Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)

Films watched in April: 6
Films watched in May: 11
Rewatches in April/May: 9
Total tally for 2015: 81

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

March 2015 - MDP Film Journal

The Last Polka (John Blanchard, 1985)

The month of my birthday I am often able to throw down the gauntlet and really get some movie-watching in. 

Best of March 2015
1.  The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993)
2.  The Last Polka (John Blanchard, 1985)
3.  The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990)
4.  A Confucian Confusion (Edward Yang, 1994)
5.  Out for Justice (John Flynn, 1990)
6.  That Moment: Magnolia Diary (Mark Rance, 2000)

Favorite Rewatches of March 2015
The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)
L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992)
Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
Snake Eyes (Brian De Palma, 1998)
The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
Cop Land (James Mangold, 1997)
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)

Films watched in March: 34
Rewatches in March: 18
Total tally for 2015: 65

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

February 2015 - MDP Film Journal

Presumed Innocent (Alan J. Pakula, 1990)

Continuing the 90s viewings but most of my new viewings weren't that great. I was more successful with the rewatches. 

Best of February 2015
1.  Presumed Innocent (Alan J. Pakula, 1990)
2.  Galaxy Quest (Dean Parisot, 1999)
2.  Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985)

Favorite Rewatches of February 2015
The Lion King (Rogers Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994)
Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)
Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992)
Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998)
The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012)
The X-Files (Rob Bowman, 1998)

Films watched in February: 16
Rewatches in February: 8
Total tally for 2015: 31

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

January 2015 - MDP Film Journal

Can't Hardly Wait (Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont, 1998)

The 90s has been my main cinematic focus and will continue to be for the next few months. I didn't squeeze in a ton of movies in January but here are the highlights.

Best of January 2015
1.  Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)
2.  L'Enfer (Claude Chabrol, 1994)
3.  Hobson's Choice (David Lean, 1954)
4.  Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1996)
5.  Godzilla (GAreth Edwards, 2014)

Favorite Rewatches of January 2015
Can't Hardly Wait (Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont, 1998)

Films watched in January: 15
Rewatches in January: 2
Total tally for 2015: 15

(I'm borrowing this format idea from Curtsies and Hand Grenades.)

Apocalyptic Nighttime: Taxi Driver (1976)

One of the most beautiful title cards in the history of cinema, Scorsese's Taxi Driver links us not only to the seedy grindhouse,
with its fading yellow-orange font, but also to the grand moviehouses of Hollywood's golden age, with its iconic Bernard Hermann score.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
I can see the moment in Scorsese's career where he steps confidently into the role of a great director: the gun purchasing scene in Taxi Driver.  Seen through the singular point of view of Travis as he eyes each gun, with a particularly beautiful pan across the .44, the salesman talks and talks about the benefits of every gun and we stay on Travis as he feels the gun in his hand, following his sightline out the window, across the city, over the freeway and to a couple of pedestrians milling about on the sidewalk several stories below.  No click of an empty chamber.  No comment about the scum. We have no clue where this is going or how far, but we know everything in this world is wrong and it is frightening to imagine what Travis may end up doing.  When he points the gun out the window, the camera's lens is focused on the outside, not the gun.  We feel his mind, even though we do not know it through narration.  

Our hero, imagined: insulated with words, overlooking the city, violence brewing.  A prophet of rage seeks for his voice.

Mud (2012) and the Shipwreck of Southern Masculinity

Mud (Jeff Nichols, 2012)
Few contemporary filmmakers have nailed an atmospheric sense of place as certainly as Jeff Nichols has.  The South in Mud is dirty, ragged, barely welded together by a guy in a garage, but it still runs.  That's not the whole picture, and Nichols doesn't pretend it is, but it is the existential reality of these particular characters.  They continue to embrace it and therein find their identity.  "I ain't no townie," Ellis tells his dad when told he will be moving to town after his parents split up.  His dad understands but finds himself helpless to do anything different.  Matter of fact, it looks like he's always found himself a little overwhelmed by the basic responsibilities of life.
Talking.  
Loving.  
Giving.  
Listening.  
These aren't things Senior is particularly good at.  
And soon he will pass a lineage of brooding silence onto his boy.
Ellis is a romantic.  It's easy to figure Senior probably was too, once.  He will learn the way of his father through heartbreak.

The most evocative shot in the film.  The stoicism of the southern male exemplified.  

The Spider's Stratagem (1970)

The Spider's Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
Movement through time and space.
Tiny movements, barely discernible.  
The decisions made in a moment.  The people who made them.  The reasons don't matter.

The son of a hero comes home.  He mirrors his father.  
The same name, the same look.
Athos Magnani.
There is his old mistress.
There is the memorial.  
There are his old friends.
There are the memories.
There are the lies. 

Where does one end and the other being?
The son walks in all the same corridors, fields and roads.
He may be looking for closure.  Closure is an abstraction.
Railways eventually covered over by grass.  Single, sharp parallel lines eventually broken by the convergence of thousand askew lines, all for their own purposes.

Bertolucci builds slowly, allowing these movements to linger.
Clarity is not his end goal. 
Literary allusions.
Fascism and anti-fascism (of course). 
Reality and illusion.
Sometimes, the invisible men.

There is the oppressive realization that truth is good for some but the masses need the illusion, they crave it.  The symbolic pointing to something great outside themselves.
The corporate imagination.

film journal entry: 06.14.2013

1900 (1976)

1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)
History is inevitable.  It may not be predictable, but it is inevitable.
Families, struggles, problems, politics will continue on.  
None of this happens in a void.

If there is one truth about history it is that everything related to human beings is not beyond the influence of the human beings who came before them.  If there is one lie it is that we all start at zero.  Some start well above zero, some start well below it.  Most political debate lives within the realm of trying to quantify how close to zero most people can or should be able to start.  Is it even possible to make a difference?  

The struggles of Italy are seen in two families.  This is allegory on a grand scale, but it is so much deeper than allegory.  These are people and people make weird decisions that shock us, decisions that don't support our theory of the world.  Sometimes they make decisions that don't mean much, sometimes they make decisions that have lingering consequences.
Paradoxes, contradictions, indecisions.  This is where humanity lives.

Bertolucci is not deterministic and he has made a film that breathes differently than many other similar epics.  And it is all more complicated than it seems; more complicated than a simple affirmation of one political ideology over another.  These are people.  These are lives.

The struggle is not communism and fascism: the struggle is reality and ideal.  The trick is that each person sees one as the reality and the other as the ideal.  They must then fight to make the ideal a reality.  
That's how wars get started.

But it is also personal.  People wish they were different.  Stronger, smarter, richer, healthier.  Everyone feels a struggle between reality and ideal.  For some, it is seen on their face, felt in their responses.  For others, it is seen after the fact, in regret, or before the fact in an over-compensating arrogance. 

"The padrone lives."  Or does he?  
Bertolucci wonders.  Has he ever lived?  
Has he ever done anything beyond follow the lines set out for him?  
Has he ever done what he wanted? 
Has he ever been free?

"The war is over," the man says after he is shot on Liberation Day, before stumbling across a pasture of sheep holding his wounds.  
That's how it goes, sometimes.  
Not everyone knows.  Not everyone cares.  
What is peacetime for one may be the beginning of a war for another.  

The hostility will continue, regardless because everyone feels entitled to get what they think they deserve.  
It was up to those before you to say which side of victory you fall on.
Who knows?  Maybe you'll get lucky.
Or maybe you'll get all the way to the end before you realize there is no such thing as progress.

film journal entry: 05.17.2013

Stealing Beauty (1996)

Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996)
Every time I sit down to write about Stealing Beauty I can’t form what I want to say about it.  On a basic level: I like it.  I found it moving and intriguing.  That has as much to do with appreciating Bernardo Bertolucci as anything else, I suppose.  His presence is felt: Stealing Beauty definitely feels like a Bertolucci film.  What I mean is, watching it in the moment is a conflicted experience for me, where my expectations are constantly challenged and I don’t know how I feel about it.  But I can’t shake the things I’ve seen and felt afterward.  Even when it feels at the time to be slight and uninteresting and unchallenging, later I find significance, interest and am challenged by it.  He leaves me with questions and feelings more than answers and definitive statements.  I know this is good.  I like it, as I said.  I just find it hard to write about.

Get on the Bus (1996)

Get on the Bus (Spike Lee, 1996)
Get on the Bus is a film wrongly described as being about the Million Man March.  It's not.  It's about why black men from all over America would take off work, leave their families or whatever life situations they come from for several days and travel distances of up to several thousand miles to stand in the midst of a huge crowd and listen to speeches in Washington D.C.    

Lee doesn't shy away from presenting both caricatures and complexities, dilemmas and contradictions as he conveys the fractured nature of collective identity.  What might read in a synopsis as broadstroke politicized allegory doesn't work out that way on the screen.  This is ensemble drama that is fed by unique and precise observation.  Each person on board this bus, though representative in some way of an idea or type within Black America, is not a symbolic cypher.  Lee has cast the film so carefully and given each character enough moments that there is life and complexity in every one of the men on-screen.  

Spike Lee is a political filmmaker.  He can't help it.  He thinks that way; it fascinates him.  What separates Lee's film from some grand polemic about the Million Man March is his focus on individuals.  But that is the heart of Lee's political solutions as well.  Collective change is made up of small changes, small choices in the lives of individuals who make up a collective group.  Events are nice, sometimes helpful and important.  But they aren't magic cure-alls.  They can articulate what has been unexpressed or give camaraderie when needed.  But the change he seeks is beyond a once-a-lifetime event high.  

What Spike Lee does so well is force a viewer to confront their own prejudices through the way he initially presents his characters and then subverts our expectations of them.  It isn't so much about black/white, rich/poor, but the tiny assumptions we make about people based on the tiny sliver of what we can see.  There is something universal about prejudice and misunderstanding.  Lee sees that.  No one on this bus is free from prejudice.  Some of them want to be, but how can anyone be completely free of something so universally human?

film journal entry: 05.04.2013

Lone Star (1996)

Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)
History lingers.  Unearthed in deserts, garages, drive-ins, restaurants, memories.
History lingers.  A stain coloring everything we've done.
Can we move beyond it?
Should we?

A PTA group argues history in south Texas -- how should it be presented to their children?  
Winners and losers.  Majorities and minorities.  Power and tradition.  
It is always political even when it isn't.

Sam Deeds stumbles upon a question he didn't know he needed to answer.  No one cares. He isn't sure he cares at first.  
But it lingers.  He must know, if only for himself.

He lives in the shadow of his father Buddy, former sheriff in the same small town.  Large, looming, revered: a legend, so they say.  Sam doesn't believe the hype; he lived with the man.
And Sam's mother?  A saint, though no one cares to say why.
They put up a plaque for Buddy down at the courthouse.  Everyone says the nicest things.
At least he was better than the guy before him.

Col. Payne has his own daddy issues.  He never had one.  Now the one he never had lives right down the road.  
His son knows, sneaking out to solve his own personal mystery, his own skeleton in the desert.

Can anyone move beyond their own history?
What good is history unremembered, like the mayor who knows more than he'll say?
We have to know it before we forget it.
We have to read what it says before we have the freedom to throw out the book.
Political or personal, it's all the same.

Everyone believes in clean slates but no one has ever had one.  Ever.
Even the illegals sneaking across the river now wade into their own conundrums and hang-ups.  Even language is history.
The land remembers.  Sam studies it just as carefully as the other clues.

There is always a continuing story.  There always will be.

"Forget the Alamo."

film journal entry: 05.01.2013

The Long Goodbye (1973)

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
Few people can do genre revisions like Robert Altman.  
Probably because Altman doesn't really care either way; he's just making a film.

Underneath the palm trees and drug-induced hangover of the West Coast in the early 70's is a rotting corpse.  Marlow just happens to still live there, like a fish permanently out of water that must now learn how to breathe in the air.  He will, Altman suggests, by the end.

Mysteries are everywhere but the most pressing ones involve people and guns and money. 
Lots of people ask questions.  
Do they get the answers?  I can't remember.

Marlow's cat.  Marlow's neighbors.  
Marlow's apartment building.  Celebrity impersonation guard.
Altman includes these things and they become the fabric that is both essential and non-essential.  
Narratively, they are not very important.  Cinematically, they are what must be.
Altman has a way with those things.  

By the end, we have witnessed the end of an era and the beginning of another.
A bit like McCabe & Mrs. Miller in that way, but slightly hopeful about the possibility of adaptation.  Marlow has changed by the end.  
He is simply tired of it all.  
Tired of being used.  Tired of allegations.
Tired of plots and subplots.
Tired of lies.  Tired of distrust.
It may not feel radical, but it is.

And then there is that stare.  The look on Marlow's face as he listens to Terry explain it all.
No epiphany; no a-ha moment.  
Only the cold heart of man staring back at the walking dead.

film journal entry: 04.22.2013

American Buffalo (1996)

American Buffalo (Michael Corrente, 1996)
A fierce portrayal of working class greed and American entitlement.  Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz are tremendous, finding the reality of their characters behind and through all the obscenities and Mametian turns of phrase.  Hoffman is the Ratso Rizzo that didn't die on a bus on the way to Miami.  Franz is more conflicted, trying to justify himself by maintaining an air of humanism while playing up his uncertainty.

Michael Corrente plays it cool, not "opening up" the stage play too much while also avoiding a collage of close-ups.  It is foolish to pretend that the film is not just two people (sometimes three) talking to each other, so he stages the action well within the space and ends up saving his close-ups for the moments they are truly needed.  Corrente may not be as bold in his camera placement as Mike Nichols in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (who is?), but he doesn't have to be.  He crafts a swirling, claustrophobic film with two swirling, claustrophobic characters at its core.  

Trapped within their pattern without ever talking about it -- they speak bigger than they are.
It needs to be stripped down and raw.  Remove the artifice to get at what's real.

Business.  Businessmen.  Selling junk.
They would hate to miss something valuable.
They don't want to miss that margin of profit.
I like to imagine Mamet writing a companion piece to this, with two older ladies in a craft store.
American Wreath.

Hoffman has jumped in head first: always talking, always moving, always shifting, always blaming....
Is "Teach" an ironic nickname?
It's Donny who teaches.  Bobby learns by example -- and it costs him.

Do what I say not as I do.  Typical American attitude.
The storm may be coming but that only slows them down.
We can still get what we want.  Maybe.
We need to be sure.

Loyalty is marketing.  Brand image.  A thing to cultivate in customers.
Do what you can to make what you can.
It doesn't have to be cutthroat to be damaging.
Main Street can be just as brutal as Wall Street.

Mamet thinks it is.

film journal entry: 04.19.2013

Rounders (1998)

Rounders (John Dahl, 1998)
Gone are the days when I give a neo-noir a pass for simply being one, but I still like this film.  Mostly for the performances, the way Edward Norton crawls under my skin, the way Damon seems so confident (is this the late-90's answer to the early-70's Redford?), the way Malkovich eats Oreos, the way Landau is so trusting.  

Maybe it's all a little too perfectly clever.  But that's okay.  
It's a film about clever.

The narration is smart enough.  
That smart narration kind of smart that confidently says what is really happening.  
I might not buy it with a lesser bunch of actors.  I might not buy any of it.
But that's why there are actors and that's why they command salaries.  

The muted jazz score. 
The wet city feeling.  
It is all very uncomfortable.

I guess the troubling thing is how clever people can make such bad decisions.  

film journal entry: 04.14.2013

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
What does it take to truly know another human being?
Are human beings even knowable at all?  
Do we get to a point where everything we think we know is thrown out the window and we start all over again at square one?

This film has been read a variety of ways, some highlighting the sex, some highlighting the emotion, some highlighting the performances, some highlight death.  Depending on what a critic wants to talk about, they will highlight that portion at the expense of the rest and end up misreading the film.  Maybe we're all misreading it.  Even Bertolucci, who calls the film a romance, which to me is ludicrous.

The sex of the film is circumstantial, a by product -- though an essential by-product.  Brando's character wants to strip a portion of his life down to a primeval essence, doing away with names and history in favor of raw sexuality and unblocked emotion.  Eventually, the past of the characters cannot but infringe on the purity of silence because the past both justifies and contradicts every reason they have for being in that room.  If sex is anything it is the brief physical union of two human beings and because of that, it can't simply be isolated like a math problem on the blackboard.  It always comes with people attached, people with names and places and histories and fears and desires beyond the physical.

Brando's Paul says he doesn't want to be named except by a grunt or a groan, but human beings don't speak in grunts and groans.  Maybe that's what he hates about life.  He wishes he could get to some imagined reality where language doesn't matter anymore.  But he can't stop talking.

Is it true, what he says?  Is it fantasy?  Does it matter?

She is about to be married and is making a film with her fiance about their life together and her personal history.  She is bored by it.  Her fiance's camera is an ineffective way to understand her.  She volunteers stories and thoughts to Paul who dismisses them.  He isn't interested in history, he doesn't care where she's been.  In the midst of these close relationships she is alone.  Why does she feel the need to talk about those things?  She can't help it.  She just does.

She subverts easy explanations.  The truly liberated woman, freed from the responsibility of justifying herself.  But no one is truly free; no free person can go very far before constructing barriers again.

So we return to the first question: are human beings knowable?
I don't think so.  That's the tragedy of this world.

The opening shot of the film is a Francis Bacon painting taking up half the frame.  A man sits reclined on a couch.  He seems hollow.  Maybe he's being analyzed.  Maybe he's just reclining.  Either way, his face seems broken and demonic, his exposed thighs bulge into each other without clear definition.  Paint splatters across the front of him, not in the painting but on the painting.
The brutal psychology.

I can't justify everything that happens in the film or everything said, but I can't look away either.  Bertolucci has crafted a fascinating film regardless of perceived faults that prove themselves to be strengths if viewed in the right framework.  
That, to me, is the strength of great art.

film journal entry: 04.17.2013

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)
Does this film really exist?
Where is the pride, the pretense, the artificiality?
First dialogue is 6 minutes in.
The success is two-fold: silence and ellipses.
The silence comprises a major part of the film.
Action or non-action -- the background is usually moving.
Dialogue is sparse yet conversational.  Not overly stylized.

There is an openness, a willingness to let action and decisions take place off-screen.  
Conversely, thoughts and indecision happen on-screen.

When the Girl arrives, she simply gets in the car.
No scene is made because the characters honestly do not care.  
They will take her along.  Sure.  Why not?
When she leaves, she simply up and leaves.  
Independent.  Unbounded.  The open road.

Warren Oates embodies a real person we see in parts.
A lying iceberg who must talk continually.
If he stops talking, he dies.
Sweaters.  Gloves.  Lilted smile.
Show me a better character in American cinema.

The allowance is for the audience.  Watch and listen.
Play along.  Follow the lines.  Embrace the characters.

This land is our land, every corner of it.
The widescreen mirrors the landscape.  
We see the whole thing.

film journal entry: 07.09.2012