Tag Archives: film

Spring Breakers [2012)

Every American film is a cautionary tale.

David Lynch was the new path forward.

But then something happened.

Jarmusch is good.

But no one on our landscape is important as Harmony Korine.

No one could have made this film but him.

I was mistaken.

I had them wrong all along.

Ashley Benson seemed like the mom.

But she’s just 26.

[Don’t trust entertainment ages.]

I had her for Harmony’s wife the whole time.

Making Faith feel comfortable.

December 18.  Close.

Vanessa Hudgens.

Bingo.  Shares my birthday.

Doesn’t act 27.  But this was four years ago.

Rachel Korine is a real actress.

I can’t find the artist for the shower scene.

Ingres?

It is also Casino Royale.  Eva Green.

But Daniel Craig is behind the camera.

Maybe Rachel is the only one with an honest age.

But I have to give mad props to Selena Gomez for doing this film.

[Did I just say that?]

It’s true.  You have to excuse my thuggee language.

Selena Gomez is brilliant in this film.

Why?  Because she ostensibly survived it.

Is she a great actress?

I don’t know.

Is she even acting at all?

Hard to say.

Hanging with the Korine posse would seemingly drive anyone to tears.

But let’s define.

This milieu…these trappings.  Were/are genius.  Needed to happen.

It’s like Mercury Rev’s second album Boces.

Not something most people will want to revisit often.  [including the band]

Unless you’re bent.

Like me.

So Selena’s an artist.

She’s done one thing in life which will never disappear.

This film.

Chocolate syrup in the squirt gun.

Try it out.  Try it out.

Lots of Pussy Riot.

If you can’t handle the chicken shack, then you’re doomed.

Kinda like me years ago when Uma got stabbed in the heart.

St. Petersburg.

The one in Florida.

Far from Pussy Riot.

A lesser filmmaker (Oliver Stone) would have made Natural Born Killers.

Spring Breakers obliterates that poseur film.

[And Oli’s made a couple great ones.  But that’s not one.]

Let me just add this.

James Franco is all-world in this movie.

It must be seen to be believed.

Come in with no preconceptions.

Because Hollywood makes all actors into crap.

Only a Harmony Korine can save their acting souls.

And there’s only one of him.

So we have Godard.  Korine.  Lynch slumbering.  And the Romanians.

Gotta give some more props to Gucci Mane.

[What?]

That’s some damn good acting.

You wanna know black lives matter?

Even white kids get desperate.

From shitty small towns.

And so the uniquely American version of EXCESS.

It’s cinematic.

All the detritus from the MTV vaults.

So many disposable summers.

Finally put into perspective by a true humanist.  Harmony Korine.

You gotta get real deep to see the layers of meaning from the inside out.

Remember four girls in a pool.

Finally free.

Breathing their own air.

It’s an extreme version.

Of the American dream.

 

-PD

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Žert [1969)

It would be, perhaps, best to list this as a Slovak film.

Slovakia.

We always talk about Prague.

But not enough about Bratislava.

Yet all of this would make little difference were this film not notable.

And it is quite notable.

The direction by Jaromil Jireš is admirable.

He plays with time.  A very unusual montage of flashbacks.

Haunted.  Haunting.  Hunted by communism.

This, then, would be a subversive film.

To show the corruption within Czechoslovakia.

To show the nightmare of reeducation.

The term is never named as such, but that’s what it is.

Punitive military service.

The soldiers with no weapons.

Because their country doesn’t trust them with such.

In the mines.

On the ground.

Relay.

Hup hup hup.

Power trip of professional army in service to socialism.

Trotsky is forbidden.

And so is humor.

Don’t make your jokes too pointed.

There’s no squirming out of the fact that you stand in opposition to the ethos of your government.

I.

It may not be a momentous occasion to realize that literature is being made.

For it skips under your nose as mere nonsensical rubbish.

Poppycock.  Hogwash.  Eyewash.

Tropes and memes and drupelets hanging low.  Evolving necks.  Giraffes.

I am of two Yiddish species:

schlub and schmuck.

Unattractive.  Fool.

Me and Josef Somr.  Who lives!  Age 82.

A masterful performance.  As real as my daily routine.

Shirt coming untucked.

I have kept my hair, but his combover parallels my gut (his too).  Sucked in.

Beware of jokes.

You are being watched.

Your letters are being intercepted.

And you will have to answer for your words.

Just what exactly did you mean by, “…” ???

Well, this is Milan Kundera with the story.

And I rebelled all the way.

I drew Baudelaire with lightening bolts.  And chartreuse dreams.

Kundera lives!  Age 87.

Born in Brno. (!)

But let’s back to this love-hate.

Not Mintzberg.

At the same time.

Alternating.  A constant election.

Affinities.

I will achieve 17,000-word vocabulary.  Just you watch.

I almost hate my town too.  I know.

Was I imprisoned?

No.

But I lost music.

Like Ludvík.

The name is significant.

Like lost hearing.

And so the clarinet is indispensable.

I mention Jana Dítětová because she was from Plzeň.

Pilsen.  Pillsbury.

The selfish gene.

Tricked.  Objectified.  MILF revenge reified.

Pithy memetics.

MIKE MILF.

Markéta is significant.

…Lazarová.  Two years previous.

A permanent opium war of mankind.

Opiate of the masses.  Asses.  Snippets of military abuse.

You’ve never seen…like this.

We can still insult liberalism.  And neoliberalism.  And neoconservatism.

We can still find Starbucks artless.  And Subway.

But Wal-Mart passes over to kitsch.  Of which Kundera would understand.

Like Warhol meets Flavin.

All that fluorescence.

Non-stop.

Europe endless.

Schubert.

Dip the waves.

Coyoacán borough of Mexico City.  D.F.  Day effay.

Trotsky died the same year Conlon Nancarrow moved to Mexico.

1940.

And Nancarrow would make Mexico City his home.

Las Águilas.  With his Ampico player pianos.

Ludvík is expelled from his teaching position like Dr. James Tracy.

History is always with us.

We see the corruption of good intentions.

Communism.  Socialism.

Teachers of Marxism.

How the country had slid.

And Věra Křesadlová eats her cotton candy.  Stunning.

We wonder why the movie couldn’t have been about her.

But we needed the schlub/schmuck.

And the attempted suicide with laxatives.

Which is to say, there are far more than six stories in narrative history.

Bollocks Schenkerian analysis.

 

-PD

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Trainspotting [1996)

There’s something special about Scotland.

Several of my favorite bands are from there.

The Delgados.  Teenage Fanclub.  Primal Scream.

And it is this final band which really sums up this film.

The British really have never learned how to make films.

There are two major exceptions:

Chaplin and Hitchcock.

Why would they be exceptions?

Because they made their best films in America.  Hollywood.

It’s ironic.

Because Chaplin and Hitchcock are perhaps the two best.  Ever.

Hitchcock was the better director.  Perhaps the most important ever.

But Chaplin was the bigger genius.  His talent was limitless.

So my insult is not meant to imply that the British can’t make timeless films.

They can.

But perhaps not in Britain.

But this whole British blah blah blah.

This film is going in my new category:  Scotland.

Another of my favorite bands (Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci) is Welsh.

I hope to have that category someday.  Wales.

And last but not least:  Ireland.

Which is not to say I don’t have a fond place in my heart for England.

I do.

Manchester.  Liverpool.  Bristol.  Birmingham.  Newcastle.  I could go on.

But we’re here to talk about Scotland.  And this film.

Trainspotting is, at once, a great film and not a great film.  Simultaneously.

Let me explain.

7/7

Looks like as much of a false-flag synthetic terror…the state attacking its own people as.

9/11

Heroin addicts don’t know what day it is.  Not to mention the “date”.

Heroin addicts don’t know what month it is.  Even the year is a bit fuzzy.

They’re fairly sure that a new century has ticked over.

Ewan McGregor is pretty great here.  In his too-small shirt.  Accidentally shagging a minor.

Oops.

Ewen Bremner is good here.  Especially the job interview.

Beautiful to hear English which begs for subtitles.

Jonny Lee Miller has the best hair.  Like Thom Yorke once upon a time.

Bleach-blond chop.

But McGregor has the utilitarian buzz cut.  The sad skinhead.

Spud on the curb.  Talking up at Diane.

And Sick Boy always prattling on about James Bond movies.  [like me]

Kevin McKidd is classic rifling through his VHS collection.  Desperately.

Kelly Macdonald is a revelation.

But Robert Carlyle is really the only indispensable element of this entire film.

He’s not great.  And yet he’s better than great.

Danny Boyle’s direction is generally daft.

It’s good.  Then it’s great.  Then it sucks.

But I’ll say this:  this is an essential film.

You can’t know rock and roll without knowing this film.

Boyle lifted the DNA of rock (with the help of Irvine Welsh).

The story’s alright.  The direction is passable.

But Robert Carlyle is a goddamned miracle.

He’s not conveying anything sublime.

But he’s conveying Scotland.

To me.

King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut.

Yeah, I know…Edinburgh.

But it’s just as applicable to Glasgow.

I hear it in the music of Primal Scream.

And it shows up in the music of another of my favorites:  Spiritualized.

And I hear it in the ravaging sounds of Nick Cave circa Grinderman.

The Anglophone world.

We Americans speak the weirdest.

Especially in my neck of the woods.  Texas.  The South.

But even New York.  The Northeast.

There’s one more essential element about this film:  Iggy Pop.

From “Lust For Life” to “Nightclubbing”, these tunes are moments of crystalized perfection.

Even Lou Reed is well-represented with “Perfect Day”.

If you wanna understand scumbag rock and roll, see this film.

Because the rockers are alive.

They have shite lives.

They live on nothing.

Unless they get lucky.

But there’s a vitality to their way of life.

See them in their natural habitat 🙂

 

-PD

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Lumière d’été [1943)

The page you requested attempted to redirect to itself, which could cause an infinite loop.

Indeed.

This is one of the finest films of all time.

And yet it is foie gras in the English-speaking world.

Fois gras.  Fat time.  temps de graisse++

Father time.  Vater.

If there can be a French kiss, then can there also be a French love?

Is that not redundant?

No, I don’t think it is.

Even if the French “invented” love.

And the fifth element…quintessential.

Weird film.

Unlike any other culture the French.

Madeleine Renaud is the spitting image of Hillary Clinton.  And just as craven.

Madeleine Robinson makes us drown in our own tears…with her Ophelia hair.

Madeleine, er…rather, Pierre Brasseur is a bastard, but a hell of an actor.

He plays on Duchamp.  Yves Klein.  And prefigures both.

Étant donnés.  Finished in 1966?

And begun in 1946…the year before the Black Dahlia murder.

[in exactly the same pose]

Maybe not.

But Paul Bernard is the biggest bastard of all.

A cuckoo sniper.

Remember the Beltway sniper attacks?

A quick perusal leads to only one possibility:  strategy of tension.

And look at the world news.

Remember China’s accession to the WTO in October 2001.

[before the smoke of 9/11 had cleared]

Literally.

Even the cable guys know this.

But I guy dress.

I most humbly submit the case of Mr. Tojamura.

What we have here is Opération béton 12 years early.

Work.

And love.

And so many cuckoo personages.

You must watch this film to see film language be broken so immaculately.

We would expect nothing less (nor more) from occupied France.

 

-PD

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Riso Amaro [1949)

Robert Bresson said, “I believe in cinema.”

In English?  Like that?  I don’t know.

But it is truly the thought which counts here.

Because I believe in cinema.

Cinema.

Maybe it’s my favorite word.

My religion.

The great omnist hymn of all lands.

Of all the hands which have pitched in to turn the wheels of the mind.

And so this film, Bitter Rice, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.

Not because it is flowery and seductive. [It’s not flowery.]

Not because there are perfumed stars in diamonds. [There’s no perfume.]

But because it is real.

As real as cinema gets.

Not the hyperreal of Harmony Korine’s Gummo.

Not even the transparent real of documentary footage.

But a real which is uniquely Italian.

To say neorealism is to cheapen the whole creation.

This is a masterpiece by director Giuseppe De Santis.

You must live through the rain to understand it.

You must have had no hope to fathom the slop.

You must wade in de water.

Because you are seeing Italian opera.

There’s no speech in the field.

No talking.

Workers are in the prison of labor.

Same kinds of rules.

But if you sing, that’s tolerated.

And so it all must be sung.  In the fields.

Puccini famously bragged about his facility.

Give him a grocery list, he said.

And Willie Sutton had his hygiene and motivators covered.

Even if he never uttered the famous phrase.

He ENJOYED robbing banks.

And, yes, that was where the money was.

And so the field workers not only display humanism.

Not only embody feminism.

But engage in a little triage worthy of Sutton’s law.

Taking the poor girl to the embankment.

[They’re all poor.  This is 1949 Italy.]

It’s not psychotic fugue, but psychogenic fugue.

Fugue state.

Thuringia.

The Axis Powers played a very bad game of chess.

Stretto was the shit hitting the fan.

“Ride of the Valkyries” mixed with heavy artillery mixed with vocalizations of agony.

Ristretto is what you get at Starbucks.

But, dear friends, don’t stop after the first half.

Let it finish.

Let it bleed.

Shine a light.

For Silvana Mangano.

Sylvania.  Someone has etched the word “hope” into the light bulb’s socket.

In the Schwarzwald.

The deep eerie mystery of the woods.  And Hitler’s aerie.

[Godwin golden mean]

34 21 13 8

almost Fibonacci but ending

aND nothing more Italian that an actress named Doris Dowling.

But that’s the way it went.

Direct descendent of opera verismo.

Our old favorites Mascagni and Leoncavallo.

But Netflix hasn’t gotten at the heart of what this means.

“Strong female lead” or some such rubbish.

Nice try…

But Riso Amaro blows all those venal pigeonholing strategies out of the water.

Cinema is not my God.

Cinema is my religion.

 

-PD

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Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut [1956)

I wanted to write last night, but the Internet fell asleep.

This is one of my favorite films ever.

But I needed to rewatch it.  As I always do.  Every movie.

Real fear.

Real danger.

A long project.

Extracting yourself from the superjail.  The prison planet.

A Man Escaped.  We have it easy in English.

But witness the fullness of the French title.

It speaks to care.  Rope.  Hooks.  Months.  Of planning.

And it all started with a spoon.

Tin nor aluminum will do.  Neither.

We must wait for iron.

Steel?

Iron.  Hardness.

It’s World War II.

Today.  World War III.

And for the CIA, World War IV.

Chemists.  Physicists.  And now mathematicians.

Computer scientists.  Statisticians.

No, that’s post-War.  Japan.

But for now we are locked in a room of our own making.

If we can only get through the door.

tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap

tap tap tap tap

tap tap tap tap tap tap tap

Which isn’t to say, taps.

We must succeed at this chess game.

Playing against an adversary with few weaknesses.

Multiple layers of defense and surveillance.

Doors and locks and gates and bars.

And silence.

It is the silence which will betray us.

And so, Dr. No, we must slip our shoes off for a little putting practice.

It is a real battle.

CIA vs. FBI.  Refereed by the NSA.

NGA vs. NRO.  Chantilly lace vs. a pretty face.

A girl and a gun.

ASIS vs. DIGO.  Or dingo.

Rich.

ASCAP vs. BM.I

But let me back up to the kebab organization known as SHISH.

Apologies to Belgium.

But it is worth noting SV/SE vs. CSIS/SCRS.

Scissors.  Suckers.  A scissor.

A pair of scissors.

He would need more leverage.  The most overused word in business.

And as meaningless as “innovation”.

What they mean is “interesting”…that’s innovation.

And by false flag, “not what it seems”.

Dear NEADS in Rome (NY) uttered collectively the phrase of Baudrillard’s lifetime:

“Is this real-world or exercise?”

But we have remembered it as simulation.

Going over his escape a million times in his head.

With poor reconnaissance.

Except the dead would-be escapee.

“He’s practically free.”

“No one’s practically free.”

Jessica Lange, incredulous.

But she’s not in this movie.

She’s headed to Roswell.

Named after Yale graduate Roswell Rudd.

A little town in New Mexico.

Out of time.  Mind.

CSE vs. GCHQ.  Or CSEC.

An animal with five eyes has no competition.

Within himself.  The owls are not what they seem.

Fifth wheel.  Hokey pokey.

Valuable antipodes.

And RCMP vs. FBI.  Horses.  Or moose.

Hippopotamus.  POTUS.  Not amused.

DND seems incorrect.

What was Fontaine in for?

And Jost?

DIPOLCAR.  Position.

MSS vs. RSS.  Seems so simple.  Really simple!  And so complex.

Pledged ΚΥΠ.

But the division.

ÚZSI vs. UZI.  Sounds dangerous.

With PET we get to canned milk or breaking wind.

A lovable Lego intelligence agency.

Of one.

Just one?

KaPo vs. capo.  Vs. ligatura.

Hitchcock’s rope vs. Bresson’s rope.

For this is Robert Bresson.  The movie.  Under consideration.

SUPO vs. sumo.

But we really get fired up by DGSE.

And it’s only appropriate.

DGSE vs. BND.

The only war which has ever been fought.

Das Fenster vs. la fenêtre.

The most delicate element of escape.

A crack in the breeze.

SIN vs. voodoo of all sorts.

GRLS.  Girls?  Gorillas?  Scalded ape?

When you need headache relief quick.  Choose BAINTELKAM!

A Buddhist temple with a surrounding population 95% Muslim.

Amazing.  Elton John.

MOIS.  Ooh…  Now we are getting serious.

Putting the me in month.

And of course “the Institute” (moving alphabethically).

Lisping along.

How will you project your escape.  Like Desargues.

And Poncelet.

The movie camera.

Go directly to jail.

Whale song matryoshka.

AISE.  Must be the coolest.  Standard issue Ferraris.  And meals in Modena.

Like Matthew Broderick’s brief moment of cool in Election.

Gid Tanner and his Skillet-Lickers…coming to the Kingdom of Jordan…real soon.

SREL.  Sreally?  That’s SRAL.  Like SalvaDali.

CISEN as sí señor.

Not quite hermeneutics.

FIB vs. SIN.

PST.  Masters of recruitment.

And FOST vs. SIE.

The big daddy ISI vs. ailleurs.

The canal of SENIS.  Central American zipper.

Could have been Lake Nicaragua.

AW 🙂 Georges Sand approaching Chopin with flowers.

He was a woman.  Mr. Sandman.

SIRP vs. usurp.

SVR vs. GRU. [now we’re making some sense]

And DEVGRU vs. GRU.

GIP is priceless.  One letter from perfection.

VOA vs. VOA.

NISA vs. NASA.  And the incomparable skills of PIS.

In joint operations with SENIS.

CITCO vs. Citgo.

Must it be?  It must be.  It MUST be.

And back to our MI6 and DIA and ONI.

These are the thoughts of a man in jail.

Where having a pencil is punishable by firing squad.

And so he builds his hope on escape.

From the mundane.

He is a true soldier.

Though he be stripped of any recognition.

Wisdom is that final step.  On a journey which started with mere data.

 

-PD

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Ucho [1970)

A banned film.

From communist Czechoslovakia.

Party as nightmare (like O slavnosti a hostech).

But different.

Walls on all sides.

Claustrophobic.

As if Jeremy Bentham was tomorrow appointed head of the NSA.

From the single, centralized watchtower.

Stares out the embalmed ego of Bentham.

Auto-icon.

It’s just a skeleton stuffed with hay.  Dressed in Bentham’s clothes.

Like the panopticon.

A straw man prison.

Dear friends, I know of no film which conveys the horror of the 21st century.

Quite like this gem of resistance against totalitarianism.

This was the underbelly of communism.

The “evil empire” of which Reagan spoke.

His words seem funny today.  His unscientific, hypocritical words.

Because the Red Scare in the United States was typified by the same methods on display.

Here.

Surveillance.

Which I fear will not subside anytime soon.

Nor has this wave even crested.

“Mass surveillance doesn’t work,” Mr. Snowden wrote. “This bill will take money and liberty without improving safety.”

Finally The New York Times prints something worthwhile.

And even Hillary Clinton’s “History made.” ad can’t deflate the importance of Snowden’s words.

And so if you want to see the 12-tone paranoia of the communist “big brother” state (now that we are living in a “capitalist” big brother state), I would heartily recommend The Ear by director Karel Kachyňa.

It was banned for 19 years in Czechoslovakia.

Because it got real close to the truth.

It painted the communist party leaders as a bunch of jerks.

It portrayed the constant suspicion upon bureaucrats as a living nightmare.

The Ear.  Maybe some HUMINT at the party.

But largely this film deals with SIGINT (if author Jeffrey T. Richelson can be trusted).

The Ear deals primarily with what Richelson calls “clandestine SIGINT” in his book The U.S. Intelligence Community.

What we encounter in Ucho are “the oldest of these devices” (viz. “traditional audio surveillance devices”).

Wikipedia does a passable job outlining this area of inquiry in the article “Covert listening device”.

But dear friends…describing it so matter-of-factly does no justice to the strain which omnipresent surveillance puts on largely innocent people.

And therefore The Ear is a film which shows the psychological toll that governments exact when they make ethics secondary.

What we get from director Karel Kachyňa is the portrait of a society (his society) which assumes all citizens to be guilty until proven innocent.

This is ostensibly the opposite of the American system, but today’s Amerika is merely the other side of the coin:  same pervasion of surveillance (even if it is “capitalist”).

My hypothesis is that “free market” America has come to all-to-closely resemble the regimes it fought to defeat.  Those “victories”, then, were hollow.  We have appropriated the worst, most tortuous means of our past enemies.

But Kachyňa has another message for us in this masterpiece.

In such upside-down societies, promotion might be the worst form of punishment.

Beware, my coopted friends.

 

-PD

 

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O slavnosti a hostech [1966)

This is one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen.

Rarely have I seen such uneasiness conveyed through cinema.

The really terrifying part is.

How mundane all of the symbols are.

Is/are.

Insane.

For a moment.

Like the Czech version of Deliverance.

We see “party” in English (in the context of Czechoslovakia), and we think.

Communist Party.

But the slavnosti in question translates to “feast”.

Google tells us.

And Google is never wrong.

Right?

Which is to say.

Hell is a party.

A party from which you wish to flee.

Beggar’s banquet.

There is no leaving communist Romania.

And Czechoslovakia?

I can’t tell you, dear friend.

But we know of the boy who swam the Danube.

Symbolic.

To nonaligned Yugoslavia.

And from there to Italy and Toblerone.

That’s Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii.

But what we have here is A Report on the Party and the Guests.

Report.

Also sounds very bureaucratic.  Quintessentially communist.

Let’s take the popular notion that Kafka sums up bureaucracy.

In which work?

The Trial? With Josef K.?

Yes.  This is most applicable to O slavnosti a hostech.

We must learn to speak every language.

Like Pope John Paul II (slight exaggeration).

Because Kafka wrote in German.

Der Process.

It’s a process of ablaut-ish metamorphosis.

Prozess –> Proceß –> Prozeß

swimswamswum

Kafka died in 1924.  Age 40.  My age in six months.

1948/1949 Czechoslovakia becomes part of Soviet bloc.

Comecon.

Not to be confused with Comic-Con.

And never any Poto and Cabengo in San Diego.

Though they be in their own backyard.

Grace and Virginia were superheroes without costumes.

And they had their own language, by golly.

Brings tears to my eyes.

To see them playing potato.

“What are they saying?”

This is the absurdity of blogging about the absurdity of a film inspired by the absurdity of Kafka.

But likely unconscious.

This genius (director Jan Němec) died only a few months ago.

But he gave the world a belly laugh.

And an unnerving masterpiece.

It is not as obviously magnificent as Closely Watched Trains.

But it is supremely subversive.

In a totalitarian state (like Amerika)…which is completely ruled by commodity relations.

This is our last recourse.

England swings.

Like a pendulum.

From the gallows.

Frexit (France leaves NATO…again).

Hexit (Hungary curses continental Europe from Buddhapesht to Bookarrest)

Crexit (Croatia invents new correction fluid for computer screens)

Spexit (Spain certifies that said correction fluid meets ISO standards)

Esexit (Estonia doubles GDP overnight with racy dating service app)

Slexit (a dual rush for the doors by Slovakia and Slovenia)

Rexit (Holy Roman Emperor reestablished in Romania, confined to Bookarrest)

Fexit (Finland engages in creative destruction)

Pexit (Poland and Portugal [in that order] gobble seed with bobbing avian head motion)

Irexit (being both hungry and anorexic [morbidly hangry], Ireland joins the Brits in bolting)

Everyone else stays.

Until the Czexit.  [ooh la la]

Serbia accedes and secedes in same day simply to give the world the thrill of Sexit.

[I know I know]

This is the rearrangement of guests.

So many not at the world table.

In such times.

Only art can explain.

 

-PD

 

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Poto and Cabengo [1980)

This is the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen.

16 ways to say potato.

Eclipses Ira Gershwin by 14.

George and Ira.

Grace and Virginia.

Poto and Cabengo.

Godard and Gorin.

It’s maddening.

That time has forgotten the most beautiful girls ever.

Wild and free.

The playful sounds of Poto and Cabengo.

Maybe there’s no finding them.

And that’s the message.

That they disappeared like their ephemeral language.

But I want to know.

What happened to the most beautiful girls ever?

We want to capture the past.

We can’t let it get away.

Because we are so moved by the images and the sounds.

What if I lost my language?

This language I have worked so hard to develop.

Science would call me a sophist.

Stylometry might have something to say about how developed my idiom is.

I cannot tell you, people, how much this movie moved me.

Napoleon Dynamite is like Shaft in comparison to the realness herein.

Intelligent Dasein.

I can’t possibly be the first to that pun.

But we wonder:

who will be the first blogger to win a Nobel in literature?

[surely not me]

Putting aside the auto-response for a moment…

Because it is bound to happen.

Writer started as blogger and progressed to…what.

Books?

Folio.  Quarto.  Octavo.

Potato.

1 patata 2 petata 3 pitata 4

5 potata 6 putata 7 pateta more

Abandoned in your own home.

The wild child and her double.

Theater of cruaute.  Crunchy crouton vegetables 🙂

And the zoo!

The San Diego Zoo.  So that you can love your city.  San Antonio.

“People say we got it made/Don’t they know we’re so afraid?”

…think we don’t know what staccato means.  Shit…

It’s our secret language.

As if the Navajo code talkers had dwindled down to two.

Pound would write a much more erudite version of this.

So much so that it was completely unintelligible.  And brilliant.

Have I mentioned Jean-Pierre Gorin?

Because he’s a genius.

The only collaborator through whom Godard’s name was subsumed.

Their language became strictly verboten.

They weren’t sent back into the forest.

We welcomed them.  To mop floors at a McDonald’s.

And work on an assembly line.

And I love them.

Because that’s what America sends its geniuses to do.

Wipe up fast-food fry grease.  And God knows what kind of menial work.

There are no more worthy stars in the history of film than

Grace and Virginia (“Ginny”) Kennedy.

Beauty is forever.

 

-PD

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Иван Грозный Часть I [1944)

[IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART I (1944)]

Have you ever used Russian Wikipedia?

Because you can’t just type Ivan the Terrible.

You can’t even type Ivan Grozny.

Not least, you cannot type NBaH rpo3HbIN yactb I.

No, certainly not.

But by that point, you are close.

Funny thing about the Cold War was that it was cold.

No shooting.

At least the big guns.

Boom boom.

It was an economic war.

It would really be unfair to capitalism to claim that it didn’t win.

Ah, good old capitalism.

Capitalism is bad in a lot of ways, but it is an economic beast.

Communism is good in a lot of ways, but it got its butt kicked by capitalism.

But our story predates Marx and Lenin by centuries (even though it was commissioned by Stalin).

What we have here is a masterpiece of Soviet film:  Ivan the Terrible (Part I).

It’s important.  Part I.  Часть I.

Because Часть II wouldn’t appear for another 14 years (Stalin was a fickle patron).

And Часть III would never appear.  [It was destroyed after the director’s death.]

And what a director!

Sergei Eisenstein was a true auteur in every sense of the word.

When he died in 1948, Часть III more or less went with him.

Considering that, it’s amazing that Часть II itself even survived.

It was only the “Khrushchev thaw” which occasioned its eventual release in 1958.

But the year is 1944.

And the year is also 1547.

16 January 1547.

And Ivan (though he doesn’t look it in the film) is 16 years old.

It’s not Reims.

But it rhymes with…Bosco?

If it had a rhyme, Bob Dylan would have smacked it right down in the middle of The Freewheelin‘ or Another Side…

Good old Moscow!  Москва́

Something like that…

And so we see a truly riveting coronation (this is not really a spoiler…1547).

We must remember what “the Terrible” meant.

Or means.

As I understand it…it’s neither good nor bad.

Terrible as in terror…but also as in “fear God”.

Perhaps I have botched it.

grozny (miniscule).  As opposed to the capital of Chechnya.

Let me just say this:

Nikolay Cherkasov (in this film) is the spitting image of Nick Cave.

[God forbid an iconoclast get ahold of a spitting image!]

Some might need a further clarification.

I mean the Nick Cave from Warracknabeal, Australia.

Not the one from Fulton, Missouri.

Clear?

“2000 years of Christian history baby/and you ain’t learned to love me yet”

Something like that.

Ivan the Terrible “read that book from back to front”.

“It made a deep impression” (on his forehead).

But they didn’t have BBC Radio 4 in Russia in 1547.

So not even a gift of a chess set could cause Queen Elizabeth to beam a broadcast of Gardeners’ Question Time over to Ivan.

Alas, he was on his own…

Boyars be boyin’ [if you know what I mean].

I must admit, I’m rather proud of myself for figuring this out.

To wit, Михаил Названов looks like Gene Wilder as Jesus.

Tsk tsk, English Wikipedia.

Which is to say, Andrey Kurbsky is played by Mikhail Nazvanov.

Every epic needs a great beauty 🙂

And Lyudmila Tselikovskaya is no exception.

She is chaste (and chased).

English Wikipedia gives no hypertext love.

But there is an article.

She was from Astrakhan.

And here she portrays Ivan’s bride Anastasia.

Such a lovely word…tsarina.

And by Astrakhan we certainly don’t mean Canadian military fur wedge cap.

Clear?

Ivan the Terrible is basically Donald Trump (for anyone needing a reference).

Which is why Stalin identified with Ivan.

Putin is another good reference point.

For that matter, Pavel Kadochnikov’s effeminate, moronic character is a good symbol for the past 16 years of American presidency.  Imagine W. as a metrosexual in 16th-century Russia.  You’ve got it!  16 & 16.

Marriage is the end of friendship (in more ways than two).

And so Philip II, Metropolitan of Moscow heads off to the monastery.

But at this time he was just Feodor Kolychev.

Family Glinski mentioned.  Family Zakharin mentioned.

But the House of Romanov takes an extra effort.

Anastasia’s side.

Do you remember Kazan from Quantum of Solace?

I never properly expressed my admiration for that film.

Tosca in Bregenz.  Exquisite!

Back to Kazan…  Poor saps vs. rich saps.

And military strategy comes to the fore.  That of Ivan.

Their strength was sapped.  One letter from tapped.

That would be Operation Gold!

There’s a Tartar sauce of brutality (?) reminiscent of ¡Que viva México! (remember the horses and the buried guys???).

Same camera angles.

En plein air version of coronation.  The doubters.  Maybe Eisenstein took a thing or two from Welles?

Because Citizen Kane was 1941.

The Soviet Union joined the Allies in June 1941.

Citizen Kane premiered the previous month and would open in theaters across the U.S. the coming September.

So we wonder whether one of the first “chess sets” of understanding was a copy of Welles’ film.

Back to these Tartars.  That’s just the Western version of Tatar.

An extra R (gratis).

You may need some tarragon as well.

It certainly wasn’t “Palisades Park” for these poor Tartars.

No Freddy Cannon sound effects to distract them before being picked off by (demonym-for-people-from-Kazan) arrows.

It’s almost a Thelonious goatee.  Pharaonic.  Sun Ra-nese.

Over and over we hear of Livonia.

Reval (which is today Tallinn, Estonia).

An iron curtain required iron men.

Oprichnina.  A policy.

Oprichnik.  Of the Oprichniki.  Political police.

Oath of allegiance (starting to sound like Dale Cooper).

But lets not get caught up in bikeshedding.

This film is a masterpiece throughout.

 

-PD

4 Comments