ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

(Dir. Miranda July) California Theater- 8/24

The movie ends and I walk out into the blinding midday light. There are rose petals on the ground (but really they're dead leaves)... two girls share the earplugs of an iPod... a woman walks down the street carrying a baby- followed immediately by another woman carrying a little dog in the exact same way. It's always fun when a movie seems to change or at least slightly tweak the way you see the world, or maybe I should say the way you organize what you see- the arrangement of images. Residual vision seeps over into reality.

A central concept of this movie is "the back and forth"- two people, in an equal exchange (of poop) that goes on and on. Forever. It's a nice idea to transfer to relationships and all that, but sadly this "back and forth" is impossible for cinema, movie-watching being an inherently one-sided affair. Rather than pooping back and forth, a movie merely shits all over the spectator. There's a scene where two characters lie on the floor, staring up at the ceiling (oh the time-honored tradition), and one wishes he could live up there. It's the wish of any viewer watching any movie: to escape into that wonderful world up there on the screen... but as the other character points out, this impossible. If you lived up on the ceiling, all the things on the floor would fall down and crush you. There is no back and forth. It's one-way, from the projector, bounced off the screen and into your brain.

"In the era of graphomania... everyone surrounds himself with his own writing as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without." -Milan Kundera Book of Laughter and Forgetting

There's a French actress who, in preparation for a role, refused to look into a mirror for months leading up to the shooting of a movie. This movie is kind of the opposite: self-obsessed, staring at the mirror, ceaselessly. It's the mirror of digital video- self-reflexive, introspective movie-making. This is why it can affect a change in the viewer, they sit between between July her mirror image for an hour and a half, somehow without being reflected themselves, and watch her go back and forth, forever- alone. Could it be that digital interaction is only a grotesque, impossible mirror image of "true" interaction? I refuse to believe that any one thing is better than any other.

Don't let it bring you down.

HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP

(Dir. Barbara Peters) IFC 8/31

Everybody gather 'round, It's time to play the game where we imagine that there are no monsters in the monster movie. This game, as our esteemed senior associates will surely note, has produced great results when applied to those funky 70's Godzilla movies. Who could forget the bumbling cartoonist and his kick-ass girlfriend who take on the evil corporation and their (quasi-educational) theme park, or the little kid against those jewel thiefs as he learns to stand up to bullies (in this case the Godzilla scenes, while pivotal to the internal emotional development of our short-pants'd friend, they are markedly separate from the REAL WORLD and probably represent last ditch attempt to save a failing script- covering up a too-late realization that people just won't stand for this shit-- and in fact the topic at the heart of ALL monster stories is whether the monster justifies the story or the story justifies the monster). A goodly amount of that monster footage is recycled from movie to movie anyway- so these little folks who fill up the rest of time work much like the raps we spit over jacked beats from old records (oh I can pull it off and you know it!). Feel the human touch.

Well, what is left of Humanoids from the Deep after we remove said humanoids? We end up with a movie about...... local politics! Tribal relations are causing rifts in the community. They might sue about something. The research factory may be polluting the water (they are! they are!). These bland people are having their bland arguments in some bland town, and have every intention of carrying on in this manner. But then... monsters show up, rip the clothes off all the young women, and walk around like they pooped their pants! And yet life must go on, the town fair WILL occur as scheduled- but nobody invited the monsters, they're pissed, and this is when the movie REALLY gets interesting. Our monsters crash the party, which naturally sets off total unbridled insane rioting among the townsfolk. And despite the fact that the monsters are dealt with fairly easily (just gonk them on the head with a rock or something), the people lose it with gusto: firing guns, running in all directions, pouring gasoline in the harbor and lighting it on fire, and so on. Young men circle the monsters and beat them with sticks, but the next day townsfolk wander shellshocked through the rubble (yes, rubble) as others lie moaning on the ground. A town decimated by it's own idiocy. Which is really what would probably happen in monsterless version also. The only question that remains is how next year's fair will ever top this one.

CASTLE IN THE SKY

(Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) DVD 8/19

I don't know any little kids who act like these two, the two main characters, Sheeta and Pazu. Maybe the ones I know just aren't good enough actors. They should learn to throw on that English accent every once in a while. For example, at one point, Old Pom tells our little friends about "Eth-ear-ium" crytals, and Sheeta responds "Oh, Eth-air-ium?" I can only assume this mistake is a testament to dubbing each character separately, and like to imagine the editors when they realized what they had done... a sudden crushing sense of disappointment in themselves- someone pulls out the chair and they fall down beneath the mixing console. But they get over it soon enough and return home to their loved ones.

The kids, as it turns out, are orphans. Similar to the situation in Spirited Away, the parents are gone and the kids are, in a sense, trying to get them back. This seems to come up fairly often in these cartoons. Ash, of Pokemon fame, leaves home and wanders around the country collecting animals. I think he lived with his Aunt. Now our little boy is all grown up, and the kids have left home and they're going off to start their own family. Yet Pazu and Sheeta treat the family figures they find along the way fairly disposably; running off from the sturdy mining family in the middle of a brawl, following the time-honored tradition of leaving an old man alone in the cave, and joining a gang of pirates comprised of a group of man-children who worship their mom/captain (Pop calls them "swashbuckling cassanova wannabes"). They even fall into the clutches of Muska (brilliantly voiced by Mark Hammill), who despite being the only blood relative turns out to be a completely inapropriate role model (threatening the kids with a gun and plotting to kill millions of people, for example). I don't remember what they learn from all this but they probably end up living on a farm.

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS

(Dir. David Carson) VHS 8/20

As you may have realized from the snappy title, this is a movie about the interaction between the future and the past, the past and the future, the present and the past, and the past of the future: a mix of the old and the new. You see, this is not "The Next Generation." No. Remove the modifier and put it in plural- Generations. We get Kirk and Picard (and co). What we have here is a bit off a mash-up, something that reeks of executive brainstorming ("we'll get fans of BOTH"). This or may not be the case.

Regardless of that, the crew has run with the idea, and they pull off something with the usual tNG mythological flair. The generations are brought together (Picard does meet Kirk), and what enables this connection is (apropriately enough) "the Nexus." It's a place of pure joy, and those who enter lose all concern for the outside world- a kind of space-age island of the lotus eaters... The urge to enter the Nexus could be seen as a kind of nostalgia- a longing to stop time and drift into some distant, irretrievable past. Gentle, kind, glorious memories, a time before some percieved loss of innocence. Kirk is an embodiment of this past, these memories of simpler times. And yet we see him cruelly dragged into the next generation, into the world of modern filmmaking and computer effects. The transition has not been kind, as Kirk appears weathered, grey, and sagging, tucked into his velours jumpsuit (could this be, Logan wonders, old age?). The memory of Kirk's appearance from the classic show, fuzzy and distorted by time, has been taken into this glossy, big-screen setting and sharpened to a degree at which every inconsistency stands out. People age, but what we see is not an aged person. An old memory has been dredged up without compassion and forced into this world, this future, where it does not belong.

This is not the future of the past.

BROKEN FLOWERS- Jim Jarmusch

Shattuck Theater, Berk-

Welcome, bienvenue… Here you’ll find some comments about movies, books, and music. I’ll try to limit it to that. There should be spoilers all over the place, so be wary of what you read- at any moment we may all be ruined. If you DO read something, leave a comment to set straight whatever preposterous thing I wrote. It’s half in jest anyway, so everybody sit back, relax, and let’s watch the moon rot.

The walls of the theater were decorated in an Egyptian style that I can only assume was authentic. Hieroglyphs adorned the walls, and statues, back stuck to the block, kept watch over the seating. When the screen went dark, pin-on stars lit up the ceiling. It all lent a feeling of otherness, of being out of place. And hey, look at the movie! Now it seems there is a similar hazy sense of place. I always watched the other Jarmusch movies safe at home in the North East, and never thought much of it. But out west, coming in off frontier streets, it seemed that Broken Flowers was terribly New York City. No, I don’t know exactly what this means. It doesn’t even take place there (quite frankly I don’t know where it does). I can say that I consider the Star Wars series (all 6) to be consummate examples of the California Movie. Seriously, visiting the state it almost felts like I was running around in that galaxy far, far away, and now I understand the movie(s) in a whole new light. It’s like the main quest of the movie: Don Johnston (Bill Murray) gets a letter (or say, watches a movie) of unknown provenance then goes off to find out who it’s from- flying to a bunch of towns he knows nothing about, visiting the women there who he also knows nothing about... except for some vague idea of how they once were. The problem is that he never stays long enough to learn adapt to the surroundings. He stays a rude intrusion (A yankee out west, a movie theater in ancient Egypt) and can’t notice anything more than “this is a very New York movie.”

Somebody, somewhere called Broken Flowers another “hipster road-trip,” the latest in a long line by the J-man. In a way it fits fairly well: Don Johnston (the hipster) goes off traveling, but never really gets over his hip detached pose, and as a result doesn’t come any closer to solving The Great Mystery... Ha!