Monday, May 26, 2014
Lady Liberty's Bind
James Gray's films have in a way been exercises in reconstruction: whether it is to transport us to Brooklyn or Queens in the 80's, or to a more recent past in the same city, these reconstructions have not been only of a place or a milieu, but rather of conclaves. While great care is taken to give the viewer a sense of time and place, what renders his movies most realistic is the natural depiction of small groups of people, their associations and the way they frame an individual and his/her desires and choices made. The dramatic conflicts which inhabit his films are not put forward by abstract societal or temporal stresses, but rather personal binds a character grasps in order to not get lost amid the chaos of his/her life, the chaos they conceive the world really to be. Yes, there is pathos in how individuals handle themselves in a world full of corruption, or amidst a war they don't understand, or when burdened by the memory of past failures and shortcomings, but the dramatic momentum, that force which gives itself raw and brings his movies to the height of tragedy, is among the beats of every discordant disconnection: a character's face, a viewer, realizing that the binds they chose to grasp are slowly tightening around them, trapping them with no way out without losing the very singularity they desired and fought to maintain.
In a book full of interviews with and about James Gray (I haven't read it yet-but if you got the dough...get it!), Jean Douchet writes:
Plenty of filmmakers have 'ideas', but very few have a 'thought'. For instance,
Quentin Tarantino has lots of ideas, and from time to time he has a thought,
but it's not an immense one. On the other hand, it was clear from his very first
film that James Gray was what we at CAHIERS called an auteur. You could
immediately spot it...His work is marked by a highly emotional, sensitive and
violent thought, channeled through a mise-en-scène that is rooted in classic
auteur cinema. With each film, he returns to the same 'thought' over and over
again: No matter what we do, our pasts are inescapable. It's the very definition
of tragedy--the past, and the Gods, weigh upon us with all their might.
Monday, May 12, 2014
The Ex-Fest
If you really love movies, there exists
that magic time, the moments before a film begins as it slowly fades
in, and you have to guess exactly what you're watching. Seeing
something contemporary behind generic multi-conglomerate logos takes
a bit of the fun of it, but there's something powerful about catching
a film from another era that gives no hints, shows no credits, and
ominously utilizes a cinematic vocabulary of which you're unfamiliar.
Not only must you guess the film, but you also have to get your
bearings: someone may die, someone might fall in love, and the music
that plays just might kick your ass. And for those brief moments
before the title comes up, you just don't know how.
This is the feeling one experiences
when they attend Exhumed Films' Ex-Fest, a wholly unique movie
marathon that, for true film junkies, is the cinematic event of the
year. For four straight years, Ex-Fest has been showcasing the
strangest and most obscure of exploitation films' past, original
prints teased with only the faintest of clues, the only guarantee
being that the film would be from an earlier period, usually separate
from the horror genre (the good people at Exhumed also put together
the 24 Hour Horror-Thon each year around Halloween).
This year's fest took us around the
globe, showed us the heart of darkness, the ecstasy of bad behavior
and the exoticism of peculiar deviance. Exhumed's Horror-Thon sells
out each year, but that's not the case for Ex-Fest, which makes no
promises about what you'll see. The recipe allows for mass walkouts
and some disappointed people hoping for a more filtered bout of
exploration. You're not going to see Arnold blow off someone's face
in this festival, but you will see George Kennedy cradle a shotgun
while in a lizard suit, which he did in last year's “Radioactive
Dreams”. And you won't catch Sharon Stone disrobing to seduce her
prey, but you just might see Carol Kane seduce... well, read on to
find out.
The first film was “The Eagle's
Shadow” (aka "Snake In The Eagle's Shadow"), which begins with a good look at the martial arts from its
star, Jacky (sic) Chan. This Yuen Woo-Ping-directed fight film, which
I believe I saw once on Univision during a late night, finds a very
young Chan as a bumbling disciple to a borderline-magic old man, who
must then recruit him in a struggle between warring kung fu clans.
This is very much gang warfare on a micro scale, carried on no less
gangsta than it would be in a film like “Boyz N The Hood”. Of
course, there are the typical Chan-quality Gags And Stunts, but the
one standout moment is a brawl between a kitten and a rattlesnake.
Like Donald Sterling, these films are Of Their Era, which means that
some people on the set willingly broke some rules to get things on
the screen. So if you're seeing something dangerous, chances are it's
at least partly real. There is a real snake and a real cat in these
shots, and while the movie employs some clever editing, there's no
doubt during some moments the production had a real cat face down an
actual snake.
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