celluloidnotes

I recently reviewed the new Morgan Spurlock produced documentary What Would Jesus Buy?. (you can find the full review here.)

It’s a pretty solid documentary focusing on The Reverend Billy (not actually a reverend) and The Church of Stop Shopping, an activist group that advocates smarter spending, e.g. not buying from Big Box stores and spending to keep money within the community. They are a pretty amazing group of activists/performance artists, taking the Elvis inspired televangelist persona and his choir into the streets to preach to the “unconverted.” The documentary focuses on their 2005 “Shopacalypse” tour across the US.

The documentary is interesting and a good primer for the uninitiated, but it doesn’t do justice to their complex mission and the great work that they are doing. Nonetheless, I recommend the film, it definitely has the tongue-in-cheek tradition of Morgan Spurlock at it’s heart, which is generally a good thing. It’s interesting and funny. I’ve included the trailer at the bottom of the posting.

If you are interested in finding out more on Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir they live digitally at revbilly.com. Also I just completed an interview with the Reverend today and it will posted later this month at InDigest Magazine (indigestmag.com). (Also if you’ve never been to InDigest before I highly recommend checking it out, it’s an online literary magazine that focuses on fiction, poetry and art, but also has monthly columns and interviews.) I’ll throw up a post when that interview becomes available online.

photo taken by Fred Askew

This whole Indiana Jones fervor is confusing for me. I went to see the film, and I don’t regret it. That has nothing to do with my confusion; it was fine, nothing special, but not repulsive either. My confusion stems from the fact that I was originally going to write a review of it the night after the midnight screening. But then I realized I have no interest in doing that, and not because I have nothing to say about the film. It’s an interesting film. It’s culturally loaded. Yet, for some reason it seems as though if you have talked about film in the last year, on any level, you are now required to talk about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And I’m tired of it. (Though what am I doing right now?) I’ve nothing profound to say on the subject, or about the decay of the modern cinema, I don’t think this is an indicator of such an occurrence. Though, it is disheartening that the widely varying sources of cinematic information in print, TV, radio, and online have all joined forces to create an incredible media machine that has assisted the film in making 165+ million already. (Again, this is fine, it’s a big event, I guess.) The issue is that no one is really saying anything. 

Its inclusion in Cannes was an odd bit of early press. Which was sly on their part, because even though everyone is was well aware before the screening that it would win no awards, playing in Cannes somehow implies that someone, with good taste, thought it was worth screening. That was of the start – aside from the heaps of buzz cluttering the internet.

So, it began with the standing ovation at Cannes, that even CNN covered, as though it was real news, then it was all over NPR’s coverage of Cannes, and NPR critics are doing reviews of it, and Midday did a special piece on the facts behind the myths of the film. Even the New Yorker devoted this week’s Current Cinema to Indiana Jones. And this is all fine, there is nothing wrong with the film getting press, and there is nothing wrong with credible sources talking about a film like Indiana Jones. I can’t argue with that. But I’m tired of seeing bland criticism everywhere. It didn’t live up to it’s hype and shouldn’t critics want to write and talk about films that are interesting to them? I haven’t read an interesting review of the film yet. Most of the criticism I’ve read is written by critics who don’t really seem to interested in the film. I couldn’t even argue that they were really paying attention to the film based on their criticism.

I think there is a lot to say about the film and an interesting piece could be written, but all of the pieces have been fondly reminiscent of the older films and luke warm on the new one. Saying very little about it’s odd politics and the trajectory this film places the series as a whole into. But no one wants to talk about the history of the series’ politics, which are at once simplistic and out of date, but very current and on the pulse of America. Indiana Jones exemplified the eighties political mindset arguably better than any other film to come out in the eighties. Yet no one is talking about how Spielberg and Lucas bring this film into 2008 with a renewed sense of political vigor – or lack thereof. 

That’s all I’ve got on the subject. I’m not trying to analyze the industry, because I have no problem with a summer blockbuster sucking up all the media attention. If people are going to see the film and enjoying it that’s fine, it’s doing it’s job. But I think that the critics and the media have been sucked into the fantasy excitement and hype of the movie and have been reluctant to actually talk about what is going on outside of how it lines up against the old series.

(In honor of the end of this year’s Cannes Festival I thought I’d review last year’s co-winner - which still has yet to see a formal theatrical release in the US)

From the first frame Silent Light wraps you in warm, naturalistic cinematography. The opening ten minutes prepare the viewer for the type of intense mise-en-scene that the film will bring. The screen opens to blackness and the sound of crickets. Stars slowly trickle onto the screen as the camera pans the sky. The image settles on the horizon as the sun begins to rise behind two silhouetted trees. The natural sounds of this lush plain turn the serene landscape into a tormented portrait of the land, and ultimately of the characters within the film.

Cows begin to moo, and birds chirp frantically, all off screen. Suddenly the mooing begins to sound painful, as though the cows are screaming. The sound continues through the cut as you see the family in their kitchen heads bowed in prayer. They sit silently as the retching sound of the cows, the sereneness of the birds are crickets are joined by the incessant ticking of the clock on the wall. Johan (Cornelio Wall), the father of the family, raises his head after many minutes of silent prayer and says “Amen.” Thus begins Reygadas (Japon, Battle in Heaven) beautiful opus. A simplistic, yet incredibly nuanced meditation on redemption and family, reminiscent of Tarkovsky or the great family dramas of Bergman.

The story tracks the internal life of Johan, a married Mennonite man, with seven children. Johan has fallen in love with another woman, Marianne (Maria Pankratz), and is tormented because he believes that God wants him to be with Marianne, but he fears the consequences of leaving his wife, Esther (Miriam Toews), and children.

Reygadas worked for months in an attempt to get actual Mennonites from the Mexican community to play the roles in this film, continuing his tradition of using only non-actors. Traditionally Mennonites believe that a photographic reproduction of people is immoral. In the end he was able to use a cast entirely comprised of people from the Mennonite community and shot the film in their village.

With shots that last for up to ten minutes, unedited, the film takes it’s time throughout the nearly two and half hours of running time. The cinematography creates the perfect tone for the story. The tortoise paced tracking shots that define almost every scene often reveal more about the tormented nature of the characters than the dialogue ever does. The visual themes and tropes dominate the screen with their nuance, making the film an esoteric experience in cinematic art. A notion that Reygadas does not deny as he has frequently cited his belief that cinema should not be literature, or story, but something else, just cinema.

The result is a beautiful lyrical film. Reygadas best film to date. As usual he pulls engaging, heart-felt performances from these non-actors. Especially impressive is Wall who plays the enduringly confused Johan. There is an endearing subtlety in his ability to oscillate from the divided and simple man of the opening scene to the man who drives his pickup in circles around a friend while belting a Mexican love song out of his window. His great performance is part of what makes this film pull together into the gripping film that it is. Silent Light has more than earned every accolade heaped upon it, and Carlos Reygadas has again proved that he is a filmmaker to watch, while further separating himself from the rest of Mexican cinema.

Hello, welcome to the new Celluloid Notes. This is the new home for Celluloidnotes.net. I’m not sure if the format is going to change some with this new blog, or if it will largely remain the same as before, but I will be posting frequently again and likely start up trailer of the day again (for anyone who used to read the old version).  

What should you expect to see? I’m, again, not really sure, review, overviews of directors work, commentary on the modern cinema, all sorts of things, I guess. I’m working on it right now. You see this right now. Occasionally I will just post a link to an article I’ve written for an online magazine and not provide much in the post, but I write for a variety of zines and figure I might as well through up the link. So that will be here.

That’s all for now, just the intro. Hope to see you back here. I’ll have the real first post up soon, maybe this evening.