Author: dan

• Whiplash (2014)

  October 20, 2015

  

  Richard Brody didn’t like Whiplash (2014).

  That’s fine. Critics, of all people, are certainly entitled to their opinion. And Richard Brody is by no means an unqualified critic. What Brody’s done here, though, is fundamentally misunderstand the thrust of the film he’s critiquing. It’s a trap that a great many critics fall into: thinking the film is about one thing, when it’s actually about something else, or a bunch of other things.

  ‘The movie’s very idea of jazz,’ writes Brody, ‘is a grotesque and ludicrous caricature.’ It certainly would be, if this was a film about jazz, rather than a jazz film.

  What on earth is a jazz film? Damn fine question. The notion came to me in one of the earlier scenes in Damien Chazelle’s film. Miles Teller’s Andrew leaves the Conservatory, heading home after thinking he’s failed to make the cut for the concert band. Amid the standard cutting of Andrew walking the streets between his school and his home, random shots show street lamps, illuminated windows, signage, traffic. This isn’t a standard contextualising montage between scenes – these are random shots interspersed with the character-centric frames.

  This random approach to cinematography and editing persists throughout the film – take the phenomenal final shots which obscure the subjects’ faces, and not the parts a cinematographer would normally mask.

  So while perhaps Chazelle is not glorifying jazz, the learning of music, or education more broadly, he is certainly contributing a jazz sensibility to the craft of cinema.

  Billy Crystal is quoted as saying ‘That’s the thing about jazz; it’s free-flowing, it comes from your soul.’ This idea works for Whiplash: not only is the flow of images free, but they all feel as though they came from some deep place.

  This is particularly appropriate given that this is not a film about music, or education, or history, or culture. This is a film about the systematic manipulation and mangled reconstruction of one soul by another.

  Whiplash is a staggering film, that I’ll struggle to get over. It’s a stellar character piece, and I feel that the claustrophobic intimacy of its dark story will haunt cinema for some years to come.

• The 10th Victim (1965)

  October 12, 2015

  

  I found The 10th Victim on Letterboxd. I’m not sure exactly how it emerged in my field of view, but probably some crazy collision of Blade Runner, The Hunger Games, and 8 1/2. Regardless, I ordered the Bluray, then settled in for an evening of messed-up Italian future-noir.

  It took me a few runs at it, but I made it through. It’s not the easiest watch. Petri treads the line between noir, drama, and utter camp, and sometimes his editing lets him down as far as pacing goes. That said, his cinematographer does an amazing job to frame a very specifically production-designed future. The little touches like the yellow backlit back door on the Hunt Club, and the transparent phone box, and Marcello’s fantastic clear-topped car — these top off a perfectly-realised future-world more accurately than any leather-clad Jennifer Lawrence.

  The influence of this film is clear: from Ursula’s bra-guns that no doubt inspired Austin Powers’ fembots, to the competition itself, which finds echoes in The Hunger Games and Maze Runner. Overall it’s worth a look, if only for Mastroianni’s calm and deliberate persona.

  [cross-posted from Letterboxd]

• A day of catching up

  October 5, 2015

  Not exactly emptying the Netflix queue, or making a dent in the Letterboxd watchlist, but still productive, I think. I also half-watched Mad Max: The Road Warrior and A Year In Champagne, which I’ll try to knock over by the end of the week.

  Primer (2004)

  I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this film. I didn’t quite get it. But I really think that’s exactly the point. The dialogue is so obscure, so layered, so full of scientific jargon, but not at all in a deliberate, dramatic-concealment kind of way. If two dudes stumbled across time travel in a garage, I pretty much think this is how things would turn out. Give or take. I’ll let you know when I watch the film earlier tomorrow.

  Seven Days in May (1964)

  I expected something of a Cold War countdown, similar to Fail Safe, or its comic attache, Dr Strangelove. Instead I got a tensely-wound political thriller, quite simply detailed despite its tentacle-like story threads. Lancaster and March hold this up — and I say this in spite of the presence of Martin Balsam and Edmond O’Brien in supporting roles.

  What struck me most of all today (and you may be sensing a pattern today) is the cinematography. The framing in some of the scenes of this film is phenomenal. Some of the editing, on the other hand (I speak for the sequence where Douglas watches Lancaster’s speech) is akin to proper ’70s paranoia films (I’m looking at you, Parallax View).

  But this had me hanging, which is an achievement for films of this ilk. [cross-posted from Letterboxd]

  Pandora’s Promise (2013)

  Just to top off a day of science and paranoia, I finished up with this rather optimistic view of what nuclear power might offer a world aching for a clean and safe source of energy. I enjoyed this, despite its sometimes feeling a little like a Kickstarter promo video. [cross-posted from Letterboxd]

• GI No: The Rise of Nope-ra

  August 24, 2015

  A bout with an entirely new illness (to add to my five-week-long tussle with sinusitis) has left me with little desire to do anything productive with my time (to be fair, this illness is partly defined by severe lethargy). Thus I’ve taken time to catch up with a few movies and TV this weekend (including a sizeable chunk of Season 5 of Castle).

  I could wax lyrical about the moral cesspool of How To Sell A Banksy. I could reminisce about the very first time I saw GoldenEye (aged about 8: a very eye-opening experience). I could even deconstruct everything that’s a little off about Marcus du Sautoy’s pseudo-mathematic miniseries The Code. Instead, a brief disquisition on the other high art piece I was fortunate enough to catch up on this weekend: GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (more…)

• Spectres of the frame; shifting perceptions

  August 17, 2015

  

  Film theory is at a crossroads. The more I think about it, it’s more like the crazy Los Angeles freeway over/underpasses.

  Is the right way intertextual/intermedial/transmedial/psychological?

  Is there a right way at all?

  I’ve been running a studio this semester which looks at the role of the frame in the age of digital cinema. It’s based on a conference paper I delivered in New Zealand earlier in the year, and what I’m starting to discover (in the most wonderful organic way, alongside my students) is that I barely scratched the surface of this question.

  It’s not just the frame; and never really was. The frame’s intrinsic links to movement mean you have to examine the practice of cinematography as a whole; and you can’t look at cinematography without interrogating the relationship of shot to shot.

  The rabbit hole I’m presently falling down is pointing to a psychological theory of cinema more akin to Bakhtin or Lacan than Bazin or Bordwell. Cinema is about perception rather than watching. We don’t just watch a film: we perceive and infer, interpreting according to our own psychological constitution.

  In class last week, my students — a mix of first- and second-years — independently started discussing Deleuze’s concept of the ‘out-of-field’ and how it might relate to movement in cinema. Cinema is everything I’ve discussed: the frame, movement, editing, psychology.

  Ack. The rabbit hole may not have a bottom.