November 17, 2005
Having turned many a blind eye to the unfinished - and now, more prevalently, simply unstarted - reviews stacking up at Reversing The Gaze, I've seriously considered switching formats from essay to more managable tercets of criticism; a paragraph or so per film, gathered up on a weekly basis. I hate doing it - but I also feel guilty about going to press screenings and then not writing about the films. Especially the ones that deserve to be written about.
On the other hand, I've hardly had time to see any movies these past few weeks, much less write about them. I did see Thomas Riedelsheimer's Touch The Sound, and the aforementioned re-release of Bertolucci's The Conformist; and I've seen Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, twice (I thought once would have been enough for me, but I of course could not begrudge my younger brothers and sisters the chance to brag to their classmates about seeing it so far in advance; and so multiple screenings were attended to get them all in, and luckily it turned out to be better the second time). I think I may have a slightly open weekend coming up; time to hit the cinema. At the very least, I really need to see Paradise Now.
Last night, I managed to dig into my Netflix queue and watch a film that I missed during its one-week engagement over the summer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady. It's striking bit of work, a romance which tiptoes around passion and into magical realism. The restraing Weerasethakul displays - especially in the latter half, which is fraught with stylistic and narrative dangers - is remarkable (this is evidenced even further if one watches the deleted scenes on the DVD). The film's aesthetics are in keeping with the current trend in Pan-Asian filmmaking: the slight devolution of the static/silent style is noticeable, but still, this is a film that will try the patience of those who don't know what they're supposed to be looking for and excite those for whom long takes are never quite long enough.
Yen told me he thought that it made an excellent companion piece to Van Sant's Last Days. While the style is similar, and there are two or three shots in both films that are mirror images of themselves, I didn't find them completely compatible in the thematic sense. What am I missing, Yen?
Time for a random segue: there's an image of a glowing tree in Tropical Malady that reminded me very much of one of the handful of shots in the teaser for The Fountain. This internet trailer is one of ths most tantalizing things I've seen in ages; it's almost like Aronofsky is rubbing the fact that we can't see the film yet in our faces! God bless him.
Although I lost a bit of interest in the big screen adapation of V For Vendetta after seeing the trailer over the summer, I really like the new poster art: German Expressionism vs. Soviet Propaganda.
For an example of screenwriting style at its sparest, head over to the latest issue of Rouge, where an excerpt from Nick Cave's script for The Proposition can be found.
Posted by David Lowery at November 17, 2005 11:50 AM
Comments
Thematically, they have slight similarities (one's rebirth or afterlife being one; this is only hinted upon at the end of "Last Days"), but I thought they were companion pieces in the sense that both films have a very distinctive hypnotic vibe. I'd imagine the experience of watching them back to back would be the equivalent of a cinematic lullaby; luring you to a state of being half-asleep and half-awake, like watching someone else's dream unfold. The second half of "Tropical Malady" in particular, felt a lot like most of Michael Pitt's solo scenes, with its heightened sense of sound and environment without any dialogue.
Posted by: Yen at November 18, 2005 11:25 AM
maybe keep the current format for full reviews, but then have another section w/ shorter thoughts?
Posted by: brad at November 18, 2005 02:06 PM
Yeah, I definitely see the parallels in Tropical Malady's jungle sequences. And now that you mention the potential phenomenon of the back-to-back viewing, following Malady with Last Days would be really quite interesting (if almost aribtrary) subjective experience...one film ends with the soldier deep in the jungle, the other begins with Blake emerging from the woods.
Brad, that's probably exactly what I'll do with the reviews.
Posted by: Ghostboy at November 18, 2005 03:17 PM