My brother and I spent our childhoods checking out Monsters of Toho Studios from the library over and over. So when a new monster took a page from Blair Witch, we met some of our oldest friends at the theater on opening night. I mean, come on: giant monsters.
Somehow I saw The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris recently. A friend had unearthed a copy of this profoundly odd film, with Young Sean Penn aping a guy who impersonates Olivia Newton-John, along with Crispin Glover and the actual guy. The film’s one of those back alley masterpieces, like The Holy Mountain or El Topo
Yet one could still see those films as a midnight movie, or on foreign video. Harris’ movie has never appeared on legit video anywhere, and rarely screens at festivals. I guess rights issues should take the blame. The cost of licensing Newton-John’s songs must be out of reach for such a small film. That’s a shame, and a flaw in the way rights are assessed: would that prices were scaled somehow. These laws kept the masterpiece Killer of Sheep
Having heard about Beaver a while ago, I already had quite an elaborate image of it. In my mind, all the action unfolded in a parking lot at night, under harsh halogen lights. Of course, the real film didn’t resemble my notional one, and I felt underwhelmed while watching it. The editing in the documentary part seemed unduly rough, while the fictional versions felt rather flat. I suppose some letdown’s inevitable.
But they’re all well-crafted individually. Alone, any of them would hold my interest, whether as an outsider doc or Hollywood mistake. Taken together, they resonate, building something that has since lingered and grown in my mind. This film is layered. Its simplicity defies easy understanding, much like any of the three versions of this guy who so loves Xanadu.
So the three parts of the film echo one another, reverberating more loudly as they overlap and repeat. The structure doesn’t hint at Rashomon
Always interesting Harold Henderson has summed up an article in Technology Review on television news quite well:
TV “news” isn’t liberal or conservative, it’s stupid.
Written by former Dateline NBC producer John Hockenberry, it covers twelve years of missed chances as producers continually look for an “emotional core” where there isn’t one. Not Al Qaeda’s complexities; firefighters. Not politics; puppies.
His main point is that network news is doomed, thanks to the self-organizing communities made possible by the Internet. No kidding. He chronicles the inside reasons throughout the article, and make me feel glad not to work in network news. Let it die.
The vacuity of the network form, especially of Dateline, comes into fine relief near the end. Hockenberry laments one of his pet projects that got cut. He thought it innovative. In it, a porn spammer gets confronted on-camera by a miffed housewife, like a watered-down To Catch a Predator. When he mentions that dreck in the next sentence, I wonder if he can’t see the connection.
More interesting are the suggestions, not developed, that 1) ads are innovative because they respect the audience; and 2) something inherent in film/TV leads us to look for the emotional core. You can’t control the Kuleshov effect, in other words. So filmed war coverage has to be Us vs. Them. Even worse, it always becomes mythic. Which leads to the question: how different would my country and its politics look if we’d all just been reading about 9/11? Or better yet, if all the voters had seen nothing but tables of raw data the entire time?
This has probably made the rounds already, but: Researching an article on KONDOU Akino, I ran across a link to FUYAMA Taruto’s animated take on Jim Woodring’s Frank
(Picturebox has a clip on Youtube, but the above links to the whole short.)
Apparently some of the Elephant Six folk down Athens way have finished Major Organ and the Adding Machine, a long-dreamt movie project. Orange Twin has a .flv trailer up for download, get VLC or Miro to watch it.
I can’t wait– it looks goofy as all get out and undoubtedly undistributed, in the great tradition of odd-lark movies Adolfas Mekas fired up with Hallelujah the Hills, still a royal pain just to see. Major Organ’s design reminds me of some of the Residents’
Link via hometown hero You Ain’t No Picasso from Optical Atlas, who broke the news.
In his Best of 2007 column for The Chicago Reader, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has announced that he will retire when he turns 65 in February.
At first I was horrified, considering Harold Henderson was just excused from the paper. But it turns out to be just a well-earned retirement. He will no doubt welcome the freedom from reviewing mountains of dreck, and hopefully we’ll see more books from him, as well an an occasional article in the Reader.
I have long admired Mr. Rosenbaum as one of the two best writers on film in English currently working (David Bordwell’s the other one). I have especially enjoyed his book Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons
So thanks, Mr. Rosenbaum, for the fine essays and your exquisite taste. Thanks especially for Khroustaliov, Ma Voiture! That thing’s insane.