Steven Rubio's Online Life

what i watched

The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015). This fine film deserves its own post, and originally, it had one, but my computer crashed, and now I'm just working from memory. Suffice to say that this was my first film by Hou Hsiao-hsien, and I'm ready to see more. The cinematography is gorgeous (by Ping Bin Lee), and while there are very few closeups and plenty of long takes, The Assassin is never static. I had seen this film called "Kubrickian", which isn't necessarily a point in its favor for me, but I can see why people make the comparison. Kubrick movies are always beautiful to look at, as well, and he's not afraid of a "slow" movie. The primary reason I found Hou's film superior to anything Kubrick gave us in his last 30 years is that Hou cared about actors. In the case of The Assassin, we are rewarded with many award-winning performances, especially from Shu Qi, who plays the title character with heartbreaking subtlety. She also conveys confidence in the fighting scenes, even though she came to the film untrained in fighting. #87 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of the 21st century.

Geezer Cinema: The Little Things (John Lee Hancock, 2021). Denzel Washington plays a cop with a past, and if you've seen any other films with that description, you've already seen The Little Things. There are a couple of reasons the movie is a bit better than the others. The cast is full of interesting actors (Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Chris Bauer, Terry Kinney, Natalie Morales, Glenn Morshower, Maya Kazan). And while The Little Things deals with a serial killer, Hancock does not turn the killings into something enjoyable for voyeurs. It's not enough to turn this into a great movie, but it helps. Here are the first ten minutes:

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). Watched this again ... earlier review is linked in the title.

sátántangó (béla tarr, 1994)

Definitely a case of Eat Your Vegetables. I never found myself involved in Sátántangó ... OK, I laughed a couple of times, which I suppose is something, although two laughs in 7 hours and 19 minutes doesn't qualify as a laff riot. Yes, I know Sátántangó isn't meant to be a laff riot. I'm just looking for something to say about a movie I'd heard so much about, that I finally got around to watching, and as I expected, it's in the Terrence Malick Genre of Movies That Accomplish What the Film Makers Set Out to Do but That Aren't Meant for Me. (Factoid I didn't know: Malick is 12 years old than Béla Tarr.)

Seriously, this movie was never meant for me, and I can't dismiss it just because I didn't like it. So if you think you'd like to see a 439-minute example of Slow cinema, or if like me you are a wannabe completist who absolutely needs to see the 109th-best movie of all time according to the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They website, then by all means, go for it. Here's a tentative place to start, a Letterboxd list I just created filled with Slow cinema movies:

Slow cinema

Or, if you want to start with Slow movies I loved, check out L'Avventura or 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (some would argue these two movies are not Slow cinema), or Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (which most definitely is Slow cinema).

There was one segment in Sátántangó that I found objectionable far beyond the "Tarr is accomplishing what he set out to do" angle. I knew from reading about the film that there would be a scene where a girl tortures and kills a cat. I wasn't prepared for the actuality, though. As I wrote on Facebook, "The cat scenes were far worse than I expected after reading about them and also reading an interview with Tarr. What a bunch of shit ... oh, we didn't hurt the cat, we had a vet there, blah blah blah. When she put the cat in a mesh net, the cat didn't look like it wanted to be a movie star as it struggled to escape. When she forced the cat's face into the milk, the cat wasn't having any fun. But it's all OK, because it's Art."

In honor of Phil Dellio, I have to post this highlight from the film, since he has used it many times as a way to convince me ... well, not sure what, but it worked, I did finally watch the movie.

the passenger (michelangelo antonioni, 1975)

What am I to do with Antonioni? L'Avventura remains one of my very favorite films. I liked the rest of the "trilogy" (La Notte and L'Eclisse) without loving them. Same for Blow-Up. Thought Red Desert was a drop-off from the trilogy, and found Zabriskie Point pretty awful. I long ago gave up hoping for another L'Avventura ... I just look for something I could at least like.

Well, I don't know if "like" is the word for The Passenger, for it is one of those movies that aren't exactly begging to be liked. Appreciated, yes. Respected, sure. But Antonioni plays with our expectations. He's got Jack Nicholson in the same year Jack won his first Oscar for Cuckoo's Nest, which featured his vibrant energy, and he forces Nicholson into a quieter character with a different kind of antagonism. Appropriately, it should be mentioned ... Nicholson is one of the best things about the movie.

Nicholson plays a journalist, Locke, who exchanges identities with a dead man, Robertson. Almost gets away with it, too. But you can't get much more existential than a man who escapes from his own skin, who doesn't want to be "himself" any more ... and it's significant that the dead man is almost accidental. Locke might not even have known he wanted out of his own life until the opportunity to change presented itself. Unfortunately, it turns out Robertson is a gun-runner, giving Locke more excitement than he was asking for.

Maria Schneider is around as a woman who takes part in Locke/Robertson's adventures. There's something off about her performance, which might be explained by this note from the IMDB: "Maria Schneider was suffering from excruciating back pain during filming, and would often be in a medicated muddle towards the end of the day when her pain medications kicked in. In one scene, Jack Nicholson had to physically prop her up." One sympathizes, but as I say, her performance is missing something.

It is one of the great mysteries of my movie-going life that I am so willing to rave about L'Avventura, with its ironic title, yet am generally resistant to Antonioni's other movies, in which, like with my favorite, "nothing happens". The Passenger fits right in ... there is the barest sketch of a plot, but I doubt The Maestro cared. (And this is when I trot out my oft-told anecdote about a friend who spent time with Antonioni ... my friend said people addressed the great director as "Maestro". Whether this was true, I can verify that my friend had both Antonioni and Monica Vitti in his address book, and this was long before email.)

I don't know why, but at this moment, I'm thinking more kindly of The Passenger than I am for his other non-Adventure movies.

And there's this famous penultimate shot, which is The Passenger in a nutshell: it's one of the most beautiful shots ever, it's hard to figure out how it was done, but while it's happening, a crucial plot point occurs off screen and we never find out what that plot point was. (The image is poor in this YouTube clip, which is sad. The Director of Photography was Luciano Tovoli.)

A sidenote: much of the film takes place in Andalucía, where my wife and I were going to vacation before the Virus changed everyone's plans. #144 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

silent light (carlos reygadas, 2007)

Last year, Emre Çağlayan published Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom, which I am guessing grew out of his PhD thesis, Screening Boredom: The History and Aesthetics of Slow Cinema. You can find a list of 258 "Slow Cinema" movies included in the thesis on Letterboxd. I have mentioned on several occasions here that the idea of "slow cinema" seems far out of my area of interest. I have also noted that I often like those movies when I see them. Thus, I have seen 22 of the 258 films on that Letterboxd list, and I liked 18 of them, including 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which made my 50 Favorite Movies list a few years ago, and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, all of which I loved. It would seem I need to do two things: lighten up on the criticisms of slow cinema, and watch a lot more slow cinema movies.

Well, Silent Light marks the 23rd film from the list that I have seen, and I can safely say that I still only liked 18 of them. Silent Light falls into the category of films where I appreciate when a film seems to have turned out how the filmmaker wanted it to, but where I nonetheless didn't like it. I'm always trying to think of a catchy name for this category ... maybe "Your Mileage May Vary"? Because I don't want to criticize Carlos Reygadas for doing what he wanted to do, and to the extent I know what he wanted, I have no problems, but I'm still unenthusiastic about the result.

Silent Light runs 136 minutes. I paused it twice, ostensibly to pee, but that was just an excuse to break the boredom for a bit. Reygadas uses non-professional actors, and it works well. The movie is also gorgeous to look at. But ... the entire film is not in real time (this isn't High Noon), but individual scenes are played in real time. Working from memory (no, I'm not going to watch it again to see if I'm right), the film opens with a beautiful long take that goes from the stars to a lovely sunrise to a pretty landscape, then goes inside a house where a Mennonite family is saying grace before breakfast. "Saying" is a bit of a misnomer ... everyone seems to be praying silently, and this goes on for a couple of more minutes until the father finally says "Amen". After which, the family eats cereal. In real time.

So ... "Your Mileage May Vary", but I was pretty bored. #50 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of the 21st century, and #580 on their all-time list.

Here's an interview with Reygadas. He deserves the last word. (There is a Silent Light spoiler, so beware.)

syndromes and a century (apichatpong weerasethakul, 2006)

 For the third time, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that that Weerasethakul asks English speakers to call him "Joe". Now, if you had told me at some point I would have seen three of Joe's movies, I'd have thought you were a little nuts. They aren't "my kind of movies". Think Terrence Malick, only Thai. Joe's films move at their own speed, inviting you to meet them on their own terms. He doesn't insist on this process ... he has said more than once that he doesn't mind if people fall asleep during his movies. Oddly, I never feel like dozing off when watching one of his films. It helps that they aren't endless ... the ones I've seen all get in under two hours. Joe doesn't piss me off with his obscurities, the way other filmmakers do. I don't know why.

Syndromes and a Century is split in half, a fact I'm glad I knew in advance (I always try to remain clueless about a movie before I've seen it, and don't how this information snuck in, but it helped). Both halves tell similar stories about similar people. The second half uses some of the same dialogue as the first. And "nothing happens" in either half. (It should be noted that there is no moment marking the switch into the second part.) The movie, like all of his I have seen, is beautiful looking and eccentric. And besides the feeling of giving myself over to Joe's rhythms, I could see that he was playing with the ways memories work (and don't work). If he had told the story a third time, it would be similar yet different once again, the ways memories are.

I'll add that there are some funny things in Syndromes and a Century. A monk who once dreamed of being a DJ. A doctor who keeps liquor in a prosthetic leg. Even the way, during what seems to be a job interview to work as a doctor in a hospital, the prospective employee is asked what "DDT" stands for. ("Destroy Dirty Things?") In one scene, a sick monk tries to con a doctor out of prescriptions for drugs for other family members, making us question not only if these family members exist, or even if the monk himself is actually sick. If you can stick with this movie, you will find rewards. Just don't look for them in the narrative (or lack thereof).

Thai censors demanded that Joe cut several scenes. These included a monk playing guitar, doctors kissing, and monks playing with a toy UFO.

The other Joe movies I have seen are Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Tropical Malady. #55 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 film of the 21st century, #728 on the All-Time list.

Here is a scene (for lack of a better word) that culminates in a remarkable shot of a vent sucking up smoke:

the death of mr. lazarescu (cristi puiu, 2005)

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is perfectly named, as we spend two-and-a-half hours watching the title character's health decline. He is shuttled from one hospital emergency room to another, and if we weren't aware that we are watching his death, we might find dark humor in the events. At least one trailer presents the film as if it were a comedy:

Yes, it's easy to make a short trailer that suggests it's a very funny movie, and yes, there are moments when you will laugh. It's not a particularly sad movie. But it is always about the drawn out death of a man, and the ways in which he is constantly ignored (and in which he becomes increasingly incoherent) are less funny as the movie progresses.

Many people have noted the similarities between this film and Frederick Wiseman's documentary work, in particular Hospital. Lazarescu certainly looks like a documentary, but it doesn't hide the reality of its fictional nature. This is a carefully constructed movie with excellent writing and acting ... it's a heightened reality that removes the random feel of cinéma vérité. Because Puiu takes his time with each scene, and because the film takes place in a modified version of real time, you might think it needs an editor. But while it's long, nothing needs to be cut. We need every minute to learn about Mr. Lazarescu, and he deserves our patient attention as we watch him die.

Puiu is sympathetic to his characters, even when we wish they would act differently. No one acts out of malice. But events conspire to make it hard to act decently. It is Mr. Lazarescu's misfortune to discover how sick he is the same night that there is a huge pileup on a local freeway. Wherever he goes, the hospital is already full.

There is a running joke about his drinking. Each person he encounters sniffs his breath and assumes his ailments are based on his alcohol consumption. True or not, at the point in which we enter his life, the drinking is irrelevant. He needs to have tests done, he needs to be operated on, immediately. But people are stuck on his drinking, stuck on trying to explain his situation rather than dealing it with. The various doctors and nurses do what they can for him, but the see him as a lost cause. Which he is, physically, but whatever makes a person a person is also failing, and people are too busy to notice.

There's a catch-22 situation when the doctors decide he needs brain surgery. They can't operate without his consent, and he has reached the stage of babbling. The nurse who takes him to the various hospitals tells the doctors Mr. Lazarescu is incompetent, but the doctors, fearing lawsuits, won't operate. The nurse is told to drive around until he becomes comatose, then come back to the hospital and they will drill into his head. Mr. Lazarescu is all of us when our lives butt up against bureaucracy. And the irony (and, yes, humor) is that he only gets attention when he is unable to speak.

While the movie is specifically Romanian (it is generally considered as the beginning of the Romanian New Wave), we can all recognize the situations. As Puiu said, "This is not a Romanian tale, but a tale from Romania." I have only seen one other movie from that New Wave, but it is one of my very favorite films: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which made my list of fifty favorite films a few years back. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu isn't quite that good, but based on these two films, the Romanian New Wave would appear to be rich for discovery. #452 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time, #20 on the TSPDT 21st century list.

 

uncle boonmee who can recall his past lives (apichatpong weerasethakul, 2010)

First, I am informed that Weerasethakul asks English speakers to call him "Joe". I'm going to take him up on that here, because I'd rather type three letters.

The IMDB entry for this film from Thailand offers the following anecdote. "Audience members at the Cannes Film Festival are notorious for their visceral reactions to films. Booing is commonplace as are walkouts. People started walking out of this film after the first 6 minutes."

I know some people react quickly to horrible violence on the screen, but there is virtually no violence in Uncle Boonmee. It is admittedly very slow moving. I can imagine some people starting Uncle Boonmee and realizing halfway through that it isn't their kind of movie and turning it off. But six minutes? That's a pretty extreme reaction. I had no problem making it through the movie, and I'm not always a fan of slow cinema, but if you are completely averse to this kind of movie and wonder if Uncle Boonmee is for you, just remember some people gave up after SIX MINUTES.

It's a much better movie than this suggests, but I just can't resist the anecdote.

Uncle Boonmee is structured using "six reels", each of which uses a different style. Honestly, if you fancy yourself a film scholar, you would probably find Uncle Boonmee endlessly fascinating. I tend towards narrative, and there is little traditional narrative here. Uncle Boonmee is dying, and as he reflects on his life, various people (now dead) from his past come to visit. Everyone treats this as ordinary and matter-of-fact. At times, the film is gently amusing ... in fact, "gentle" describes a lot of what we see. For myself, Uncle Boonmee is like entering into a world I know nothing about, which is a good kind of challenging. I never completely understood what I was seeing, but I wasn't quite lost, if that makes sense.

I'm not ready to run out and watch other Joe movies (although Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century are both on my endless list of Movies to Watch). But Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was a gentle introduction to Joe's film world. #410 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time, and #18 on the 21st-century list.  7/10.

Here are the first five minutes. If you want to see the "Cannes Sixth Minute", you'll have to watch the film.

 

colossal youth (pedro costa, 2006)

Do I want to talk about “Slow Cinema” (or should I call it “Contemporary Contemplative Cinema”?), or do I want to just talk about Colossal Youth on its own and be done with it?

I feel a bit like I’m getting a crash course on this stuff, given my recent dive into the works of Andrei Tarkovsky. And part of me thinks I’m just warming up for the challenge of Sátántangó (Phil Dellio, who is the person who got me to put Sátántangó on my Request List, said of Colossal Youth, “Only 156 minutes, though--that's like a trailer for Sátántangó.”)

I don’t want to be reductive ... well, of course I want to be reductive, but I’m also trying to combat that tendency in myself ... I resist the very idea of “Slow Cinema”, not as an option for artists, but as something I want to watch. I wonder what my reaction to Colossal Youth would be if I’d known what it was in advance? (For some reason, I thought it was a 100-minute Japanese pop movie.)

Apparently I like these movies more than I realize. The Wikipedia entry for “Slow cinema” lists more than 40 “notable examples” of the style, and among them are movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which I placed at #44 on my list of 50 favorite movies of all time; Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which I loved; and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which I also loved. In other words, as with all genres, there are going to be ones I like and ones I don’t.

Colossal Youth reminded me of Terrence Malick movies. I rarely like them, but I admire Malick’s ability to make the movies he wants, following his vision without much compromise. Based on Colossal Youth, and on things I’ve read about him, Pedro Costa makes the movies he wants to make. As I once said about Malick, Costa doesn’t care if I thought Colossal Youth was boring. He didn’t make it for me, he made it for himself. I admire him for that.

But I didn’t like watching his movie.

The film looks great. It’s often so dark you can barely see, but that fits with the settings. There are occasional shots that stun:

But honestly, it’s like watching paint dry. I often call movies like this “Coffee Table Movies”. The picture above looks great, but it would look as good in a book you had on your coffee table as it does on the screen, and I don’t have to stare at the book for 156 minutes.

So, call me a philistine. But I don’t let that fact prevent me from watching movies like Colossal Youth. You never know when one of them will end up on my Top 50 list. #548 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time, and #45 on the 21st century list.

stalker (andrei tarkovsky, 1979)

I recently took part in a poll asking for our favorite “road movies”, such films being loosely defined. My top five, in order, were Bonnie and Clyde, Breathless, L’Avventura, Y Tu Mamá También, and The Wizard of Oz. Topping the poll was Badlands. My own fave, Bonnie and Clyde, finished third. Second was Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which gave me an excuse to add another of his films to my list. I admit I was hesitant ... I haven’t exactly loved the ones I’ve seen, and Stalker is almost three hours long.

To recap: I liked Ivan’s Childhood and Andrei Rublev, thought less of The Mirror, and have terrible memories of Solaris. For me, Stalker was closer to the first two than the latter two.

There is a plot to Stalker, but I don’t think anyone cared about it too much. It plays a bit like an artier, more philosophical version of Linklater’s “Before” movies. There are essentially three characters, known by their professions ... The Stalker (a guide who takes seekers through The Zone), The Professor, and The Writer (the latter two being the seekers). As they walk through The Zone, they partake in philosophical discussions about not only their own lives, but also the state of all humankind. It’s three hours of existential angst that sinks deep, not only because of the acting and dialogue, but also because of the look of the film, which is at times beautiful but it almost always stark. Add the setting, some kind of post-apocalypse world of blasted landscapes and leftover tanks that look like dinosaurs. It is bleak ... this is a bleak film, with little room for any kind of hope. The vagueness of the narrative, and the lack of explanation for what has happened to the physical world, forces us to narrow our focus to the discussions with the three men.

And it isn’t always easy to remain interested in those discussions. Some are better than others, but eventually you wish the damn thing was about an hour shorter.

As usual, Tarkovsky makes the film he wants, and leaves it to us to come to him ... he’s not coming to us. Take this segment from the film’s Wikipedia page:

Upon its release the film's reception was less than favorable. Officials at Goskino, a government group otherwise known as the State Committee for Cinematography, were critical of the film. On being told that Stalker should be faster and more dynamic, Tarkovsky replied:

“[T]he film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.”

The Goskino representative then stated that he was trying to give the point of view of the audience. Tarkovsky supposedly retorted:

“I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.”

Fine aspirations. But my name is neither Bresson nor Bergman, which leaves me once again in the awkward position of trying to figure out a work by an artist who doesn’t care if I get it figured out or not. And this makes Stalker into one of those films that I admire much more than I actually like it. And my admiration is muted by Tarkovsky’s lack of interest in that admiration. Most critics can get past this ... it’s #59 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time. 7/10.

mirror (andrei tarkovsky, 1975)

I seem to be catching up on Tarkovsky at last. A couple of months ago I watched Andrei Rublev and liked it. The same with Ivan’s Childhood, which I saw a couple of years ago. I still have bad memories of seeing Solaris when it came out ... it might have been a movie date with my wife-to-be, whatever it was, I was bored stiff.

Well, my reaction to Mirror was closer to how I felt about Solaris. It didn’t bore me as much ... it’s an hour shorter, for one thing. But it feels like a movie that will “improve” with each viewing. Sam Ishii-Gonzales wrote, “[W]hat might appear confused, difficult, or opaque on first viewing becomes something else with repeated screenings. Having seen Mirror a half-dozen times, over a decade or so, in a number of different countries, it now appears to me as simplicity itself.” Your reaction to Mirror might depend on how inviting Ishii-Gonzales’ remarks sound. Most people who know me understand that I generally resist movies that require multiple viewings to reveal their artistry. On occasion, I do return to movies that didn’t impress me the first time around, and once in a while I even change my opinion. But I am not fond of movies that only connect with me if I watch them six times.

This is not a criticism of Tarkovsky, who as an artist had every right to make his movies the way he wanted. And Mirror seems like a film he was happy with. For that, I tip my hat. But I found the movie obscure and insular. It switches between color and black-and-white for no reason I could ascertain. It takes place in three different time periods. The same actress plays different roles in different periods. Tarkovsky mixes documentary footage into the film, and includes poetry readings in the voiceovers. It reminded me of the new television series Legion, which makes even less sense than Mirror (yet I like Legion ... go figure).

The Mirror does have a saving grace: Margarita Terekhova, the one who plays two characters in two time periods. She improves every scene she is in, and she is in a lot of them. I can’t praise her performance enough. But because I was completely lost most of the time, Terekhova’s ability to raise the level of individual scenes is always only at the level of a scene. She didn’t help me understand the movie as a whole.

Mirror ranks at #29 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time. 6/10.