Art & Criticism – Page 3

Movie log June

Published on June 30, 2020Leave a comment

Thought it might be interesting to keep track of what I’ve been watching recently. Might have been inspired by Ian Sales.

The Matrix.
Twenty years on and with both the Wachowskis having come out in the meantime, it’s hard not to notice the trans subtext in this movie where Keanu Reeves discovers he is not who he thinks he is. Being ‘redpilled’ may have become a fascist meme, but the original is blatantly queer in intent. Been given the choice to either lead a ‘straight life’ or risk being murdered, how much more blatant can you get. Neo and Trinity murdering dozens of police and soldiers and nobody bats an eyelid; an insurrection against the entire late capitalist world, led by a Black man; Agent Smith explaining that this world is the best humanity can imagine… For a Hollywood action movie it sure is incendiary.

Welt am Draht.
Now imagine The Matrix, but made as a two part movie for the West-German television, in 1973 and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. All seventies lushness, focusing on psychology rather than action, but with the same obsession of this world not being real. This time however the protagonist is in charge of the simulated world, rather than a victim of it. Fortyseven years on you can probably guess the plot twists, but that did not make it any less interesting.

Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner.
Staying in Germany, this is an early Werner Herzog documentary for West-German television. It follows Walter Steiner, champion ski-jumper, during the 1973/74 season. Slow and calm, leaving plenty of room for Steiner to talk, this was an ideal Sunday morning movie. Herzog is not shy to put himself in front of the camera, to explain the difficulties and technicalities of making this documentary.

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck: Beobachtungen zu einer neuen Sprache.
Herzog again, documenting the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship in Pennsylvania. At one point late in the programme, he confesses being frightened of this language created out of commerce. This may the most seventies observation ever. This is the sort of judgementality I can get behind. Nevertheless, Herzog leaves the auctioneers their dignity, observes but doesn’t challenge.

Magical Mystery Tour.
The Beatles made some pretentious shite, didn’t they? A Sunday afternoon movie for a time when there were only two channels and the other side had sheep herding. But it does feature the Bonzo Dog Band doing Death Cab for Cutie while sharing the stage with a stripper.

The Godfathers of Hardcore.
A portrait of Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma of Agnostic Front. Hardcore pioneers turned almost respectable and middle aged. If you know the band this is a good movie, otherwise it’s a standard band documentary.

Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema
Has an interesting setup, spiraling in on to its subject. It moves from movie critics and makers in Europe — Paris and Rotterdam, moving to Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Hong Kong and mainland China, then finally Taiwan itself. As I watched this, I found myself fascinated with the light both in the movie extracts and the documentary pieces. All very soft, very mellow. It suffers a bit from assuming that you already have some notion of Taiwan cinema of the eighties and the directors mentioned, with Wikipedia being no help. But it succeeds in making want to see these movies, which is what matters most.

Pick It Up! – Ska in the ’90s.
Third wave ska is mostly a joke now, yet ever since Smash Mouth has become semirespectable to like again, a revival can’t be far away. This docu provides a broad overview of the birth of ska, how it got to the US by the way of 2-Tone in the UK and how it got massive almost by accident. I’ve always liked ska, but not listened much to this flavour of it. Maybe I should.

Se ying diu sau.
Jackie Chan is a walking punching bag for a mediocre kung-fu school. One day he rescues an old man from a rival school and he turns out to be the last surviving teacher of the Snake Fist, being hunted by the Eagle Claw school. The old man teaches Jackie his fighting style and he improves upon it after being inspired by his cat. A plot largely there only to string the fight scenes along, all very entertaining and occassionally even funny. Jackie Chan pulls a lot of good painful faces and the fighting is fun.

She he ba bu.
A supposedly more serious Jackie Chan movie, in which he is the owner of an important kung fu manual every school wants their hands on. Searching for the man who attacked his master, he keeps getting into fights with people who want the book. Again, plot is there just to facilitate the fight scenes, but more so. Lacking the humour of the other film and with some choice bits of sexism on Chan’s part, this comes less recommended.

Long men kezhan.
A 1967 Taiwanese historical kung fu movie. Evil eunuchs plot to kill the children of an executed minister at an inn at the border. But the guests of the inn have other ideas. This has 0much more stylised ways of fighting than in the two Jackie Chan movies, with the emphasis on sword fighting rather than hand to hand combat. The atmosphere in this is great, as the various parties size each other up while everybody pretends everything is still normal. A lot of enemies recognising the talent in each other and being reluctant to fight therefore, always a favourite.

Welt Am Draht — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on June 7, 2020Leave a comment

Welt Am Draht is basically what you get if you imagine The Matrix done in 1973, directed by a German auteur director more interested in philosophy than action and made as a two part television movie for a West German television channel.

How can you know the impact of a movie like this, fortyseven years after the fact and with its own remake having come out in the same year as The Matrix, itself already twentyone years old? I’m sure you can guess the core idea of this movie just from me having compared it to The Matrix. And yes, this is a movie about reality as a simulation, and yes that is the big reveal at the middle of it. But that television audience which sat down to watch it that October night in 1973, what would they have made of it? Was this intended to have been a surprise, or something that you were expected to have deduced from the hints the movie dropped, long before the protagonist did?

Wehlt am Draht: gorgeous office sets

Another thing difficult to judge: the set dressing. This is a gorgeous office, sumptuous in its “seventies retrofuturism” as the Criterion trailer has it. But would you have seen it that way had you watched it in 1973, when all this would be far more the stuff of everyday life, or was this absurd even for 1973? Certainly the outsized ties our protagonist wears wouldn’t have been that ludicrous in their original context as they seem now. In any case throughout the movie I found myself admiring the sets and cinematography as much as I followed the plot. It is all so incredibly lush, so rich. As such it slots in neatly with the seventies science fiction cinema boom of big budget, big sets movies. But unlike some, it has more going for it than that.

Wehlt am Draht: sterile clutter

The director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was one of the giants of West-German cinema; this is his only science fiction movie. It’s interesting how he manages to avoid the pitfalls of science fiction movie making that so many contemporary movies fell into. Set in the present day, present time, it has no outlandish costuming (those flared ties notwithstanding) nor much easily dated sci-fi gadgetry. It doesn’t waste time and credibility explaining how its central conceit works, but rather focuses on working through its implications. If we’re capable of creating a computer simulation that is so realistic that its inhabitants never suspect that they are living in one, who is to say we ourselves are not living in one too?

Wehlt am Draht: mirrored images

Welt Am Draht is a slow, slow movie. As said, it takes its protagonist an hour and a half of the movie to get the realisation that indeed he’s not living in any real world. That’s almost the same running time as The Thirteenth Floor its remake and it still has two hours more to run. But while it is slow, it never feels slow, because it uses its running time to throroughly consider that idea of living in a simulation, what it would mean to discover that you do so. Though it flirts with the traditional idea of that sort of revelation driving you mad, it never quite gets there. It even has a happy ending.

Wehlt am Draht: watching the watchers

Welt Am Draht ends with the protagonist’s escape from his simulacrum to what’s presumably the real world. The problem of the simulacrum remains unsolved, its philosophical questions swapped for a more mundane love affair. With no real catharsis, this is an unsettling movie, much more so than most of the other movies mining the same vein of technopessimism and paranoia that came out at the same time. Because it’s set in a world that’s recognisably our contemporary world, the feeling of alienation brought on by the high modernist clutter in the otherwise sterile office landscape it mostly takes part in, works so well. Because it keeps the futuristic to a minimum, the distortions caused by it hit all the harder when it is introduced.

Wehlt am Draht: glitches in the matrix

The use of mirrors and other reflecting surfaces by Fassbinder to shoot his characters in, the extraordinary stillness of the supporting cast in crowd scenes until called into action by the script, the way the protagonist constantly keeps moving, a discordant note among the rest of the cast, it all adds to this alienation. Especially those opening minutes made me uncomfortable watching, the thought kept nagging that something was wrong with this world, without ever knowing why. The repeated use of cabaret, with all its intonations of queerness, just reinforced this feeling. What it reminded me of was not so much The Matrix, but rather Videodrome, whic is similarly unsettling. It is very much a movie you would need to see if you like the latter.

On new music

Published on May 21, 2020Leave a comment

What do we mean when we talk about listening to new music? I’m currently listening to the album the song below was taken off, ABC’s 1987 comeback attempt, Alphabet City. I do have the vinyl of that, but this is the first time I’ve listened to it in decades. Arguable this is new music to me, but is it?

Probably not, eh? But I have never listened to ABC’s sophomore album, Beauty Stab. When I play it today, does that mean I’m listening to new music, or is there more to it? The idea after all is that you stop listening to new music after a certain age (thirty, thirtyfive, in any case an age I passed a while ago). You no longer have the mental flexibility to appreciate new things, and are forever doomed to wallow in the nostalgia of the music of your youth. A horrible fate.

But what does count as listening to new music? Ont he one hand Beauty Stab is new music for me. On the other hand it’s more of the same music from a band I already know I like. Not very adventurous. But what if you discover an overlooked artist or group in the same genre of pop music? Is that new music? Or does that still fall under nostalgic wallowing? Surely discovering an entire new (sub)genre of music does count, right?

Alcest is a French band/project driven by metal prodigy Neige, which with its first EP created a new genre: blackgaze. A hideous mutant recombination of black metal and shoegaze and I’d be surprised if you can find two more unlikely musical genres to merge. Nevertheless it’s ultimately still heavy metal, a music genre I’m well familiar with. Alcest sounds a lot different from the Iron Maiden and Anthrax I grew up with, but ultimately it’s still metal. And to be honest, it is rare for me to start listening to any kind of music that is completely alien to me. Getting into Japanese pop and rock music by way of anime was the last major discovery for me, but even that is not that alien.

Ironically, the newest sort of music I may have listened to recently is actually the oldest piece of music we know how to play, a hymn to Nikkal, the goddes of orchards and fertility from Ugarit, an ancient port city in what is now Syria. Almost 3500 years old, it’s oldest discovered song with surviving musical notation. It’s older than anything we know, a product from an almost alien world, yet put a synth under it or use the right sort of guitar and it could just as well be a modern noise or gothic song.

That Lilo & Stich discourse: racism wrapped up in ‘woke’ language

Published on April 30, 2020Leave a comment

Somebody having a real normal one about Lilo & Stitch:

Apparantly Lilo is a brat and an abuser for being angry and upset her parents have died

Now while this may read like tumblresque pseudowokeness, it turns out the writer is a rightwing creep who wants to keep children in cages. But it gets worse. In a follow-up post their friend describes how the movie isn’t Hawaiian enough because it doesn’t engage with the anti-white racism supposedly rife in Hawaii:

The absolute worst example of this was using Myrtle as a bully figure. The 1970’s were the peak of the Kill Haole Day tradition in Hawaiian schools, something you won’t find in any textbook, but any true Hawaiian knows about. You’ll also find a lot of non-natives that claim “Kill Haole Day” is fake, or an urban legend. My Mom had the broken arms and black eyes to prove it. She was a 2-time State Championship paddler for the Outrigger Canoe Club, and a Punahou school athletic scholar (yes, the same Punahou that President Obama attended). Definitely not your cliché tourist caricature. A ginger haole girl like Myrtle would have been getting her teeth kicked in on the regular, so to see her picking on a local girl is about as ridiculous as a mouse taking down a cat. Funny gag for the general public, insultingly deaf for any local, especially kama’aina.

All of which is nonsense of course. These certified brain geniuses are so smart they completely miss that Lilo & Stitch is set in the present, not the seventies, then go off how it’s not an accurate portrayal of 70s Hawaii because of lies their mum told them about being bullied for being white. Note that the tumblr post actually uses a slur for native Hawaiian people as well, just in case you thought this criticism wasn’t rooted in racism.

As we all know, rightwingers are forever taking left language and twist it to dress up racism, sexism or transphobia in appropriate language, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used so unconsciously. These are Tumblr children, using Tumblr’s language and doing so unironically. It’s just that they use that language to describe rightwing bogey men.

So in the original tweet Lilo is called a bully, abusive and the moral of “family means nobody gets left behind” is twisted to mean abusers should be forgiven. But while that sounds vaguely woke, their real concern is about ‘responsibility’, pretty much always a rightwing shibboleth. Lilo, a six year old child who has lost her parents not long before the story starts, is held entirely responsible for acting out, with no regard to her circumstances. No empathy whatsover, no acknowledgment of what had happened to her, just cold condemnation dressed up as social justice.

Needless to say her opinions got a bit of a backlash and she ultimately deleted her tweets about it, though still blocks everyone that mentions them to her. Typical.

The Death of Stalin

Published on February 28, 2020Leave a comment

It took this clip on Reddit to prod me to go watch The Death of Stalin today. It only needed eleven seconds to convey the mood of the movie rather better than the awful official trailer above, which simultaneously tries to make it all more serious than it should be and leans too hard into nudging you in the side for the humourous bits. But this is Armando Iannucci bringing the same energy of the thick of It and In the Loop; eleven seconds of Zhukov dramatically taking of his coat works so much better.

Zhukov, with Khrushchev and rather nauseatingly, Beria, is the hero of the movie after all and gets that heroic entrance. They’re the ones who act, who get things done while the rest of the cast bumble around. These are all as venal and crooked and steeped in blood as the rest of them, but Iannucci still likes them the way he liked Malcolm Tucker. They’re fun, they get to do things and they get to curse.

This is just a romp of course, a mockery. Russia was right to ban it. It tramples right on the neo-Soviet myth making of Putin and his cretins, while it makes that whole gulag business look a jolly jape too. The victims are nameless, shot of screen; the executioners get to tell jokes. The villains at the heart of it all are humanised, the same way the asshole politicians of Iannucci’s early works were. And because it is a romp, don’t take its historical inaccuracies so seriously.

Is there anything more to it than just a spectacle piece for a group of good actors to get their teeth in? Not really.