| Steve McQueen: Artist, Filmmaker, Stone Fox |
Even though he won the fancy Turner Prize in 1999 and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes earlier this year, I’d never heard of Steve McQueen until I found myself flipping through the photos from Yohji Yamamoto’s latest men’s collection runway show. Perhaps the venerable Japanese designer was following the fashion world’s recent shift towards self-congratulatory open-mindedness (i.e. Vivienne Westwood’s creepy muscle-bear runway model, or Italian Vogue’s much-lauded all-black issue– which was promptly followed by a return to the vanilla status quo), or perhaps Yamamoto simply decided that at the age of 65 he can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants, but in any case, the runway was strutted by a hodgepodge of highly unusual models. Amongst the de facto mop-topped pixies and intimidatingly high-cheekboned youngsters, the audience was treated to a handful of grandfatherly models (including one with a gimp leg) and– in the words of style.com writer Tim Blanks– the “defiantly chunky” British artist Steve McQueen.
I can’t help but think that Yamamoto had some irony in mind when he chose the handsomely robust McQueen as his proxy for a statement on the politics of body size: after all, McQueen’s much-acclaimed debut feature, Hunger, is all about using the human body as a political weapon. Centering on the final weeks in the life of of imprisoned IRA member Bobby Sands, McQueen’s film examines the passion and struggle that fueled the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. The film has been ruffling a few feathers in the UK over its seemingly sympathetic portrayal of Sands, but McQueen himself refuses to take sides. Confronted by a reporter who baits, “I would argue, [Sands] comes out looking heroic,” McQueen responds, “Not for me … If he’s in a movie, people walk around thinking he’s heroic. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing in the movie, he will be thought of as heroic. That’s the movies. You put anyone in a movie, and people think that person’s heroic.” In fact, Steve McQueen has built a reputation for not taking a position on his own work. 1993’s Bear, the silent short film that put him on the map, depicts a naked wrestling match between two black men (one of whom is McQueen). “Narrative and visual contexts, however, are absent,” wrote David Frankel in ArtForum, “this nude wrestling match has neither origin nor outcome, and happens in seeming darkness. What remains is the play of the men’s feelings - there is smiling and laughter, but also challenge, caution, tension, alarm, and a certain erotic buzz as the sparring goes through its phases.” Pulling the viewer into the film’s all-around ambiguity by forcing them to watch it in a completely darkened gallery room, McQueen doesn’t clarify any of the questions he raises, leaving his audience to construct their own point of view.
McQueen’s unyielding distance from his own work has always stood in stark contrast to the indulgent autobiography of his “Young British Artist” contemporaries like Tracey Emin, who became a press darling when she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize with her hopelessly self-absorbed work “My Bed” in 1999, the year McQueen won. “His victory was greeted by the London Evening Standard with a cover photo of Tracey Emin ‘not winning the Turner Prize.’ McQueen was tucked away on page five,” wrote Iain Aitch on GettingIt.com. McQueen finally found himself in the public spotlight in 2007 with a work which, like Hunger, raises questions about the problematic position of the human body in modern politics. Selected by the semi-governmental Imperial War Museum to act as the nation’s official “War Artist,” McQueen’s resulting piece, Queen and Country, is simply a series of postage stamps depicting 98 armed service members who have died in Iraq. In a time in which images of the war dead have been banned in the media, when governments choose to sweep the idea of these unwanted corpses from an unpopular war under the rug, the UK’s Royal Mail service has quietly refused to turn McQueen’s work into real commemorative stamps– even after an outpouring of public support for the project.
That McQueen has been able to cause such controversy by doing something so benign– something that isn’t explicitly pro-war or anti-war, and might actually honor these casualties– demonstrates the beauty of McQueen’s detached perspective. Placing himself in opposition to the self-centered delusion fostered by micro-blogging, reality television and tabloid minutiae, McQueen steps away from himself and acts as an apolitical provocateur, presenting uncomfortable questions and allowing the audience to take their own positions. Also, he’s adorable! Let’s hope he continues to pursue a career in modeling– I can definitely picture him as the new face of Dior Homme. |
Before you say anything, just stop. I know. You’re sick of Japanese horror movies– you’ve had them crammed down your throat all decade, and you’ve reached critical mass. As if their movie of the week compositions, cliché dialogue, and gaping plot holes weren’t enough, you’ve been tricked into sitting through their even duller American incarnations time after mind-numbing time. You’ve been led through the same creepy hallways and past the same undead toddlers by a parade of WB stars trying to make inroads and talented actresses slumming it for a paycheck (we may forgive you, Naomi Watts and Jennifer Connelly, but we’ll never forget).  But Exte: Hair Extensions is different! It’s a parody of J-Horror– but that’s oversimplifying matters, for this is no Scary Movie. Hair Extensions uses the horror-comedy genre as a convenient vehicle with which to deliver a diverse assortment of pure entertainment, ranging from the surface story about bloodthirsty hair extensions to an emotionally fraught drama about child abuse, to a glimpse into one adorably optimistic girl’s (Kill Bill and Battle Royale’s Chiaki Kuriyama) dream of hair salon superstardom, and the bizarre indulgences of a necrophiliac hair fetishist. Plus, there’s a musical number. And perhaps because it’s infused with that undefinable Japanese-weird quality, it all holds together– without resorting to cheap titillation or humdrum poop jokes.
Sion Sono, the poet-turned-auteur behind Hair Extensions, never appears in public without a black fedora, and is also responsible for a film which I count among my personal favorites: 2002’s absurdly cryptic, teeny-bopper-fearing existential gorefest Suicide Club. There too, he uses J-horror as a facade to delve into more interesting ideas, ruminating on Internet obsession, the breakdown of familial relations, media saturation and late-capitalist pop music. And he doesn’t fail to deliver on the awesomely inappropriate musical number in that film, either. Like his more famous contemporary Takashi Miike (who, incidentally, never appears in public without sunglasses), Sono works inside the skeleton of genre limitations, but seems more interested in having fun and experimenting than making sense or delivering a happy ending. Luckily for us, whoever keeps financing their projects doesn’t seem to mind. |
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Last night I had this crazy dream: Aliens had taken over the planet– but they looked just like humans, and the only way to unveil their ghoulish faces was to put on a rad pair of huge ’80s sunglasses. Also, the aliens were in cahoots with the elite upper class, and they were controlling our brains with television waves and subliminal messages embedded in advertisements, and the only one who could stop them was blue collar drifter-slash-Canadian pro wrestler, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper! But actually, it wasn’t a dream– it was the 1988 film They Live by John Carpenter, and it was blowing my mind.
Wikipedia describes They Live as “part science fiction thriller and part black comedy” which is as good a description as any. It’s just fun and kooky and bizarre, with a lot of heavy-handed allegory about Reaganomics and capitalist excess. Basically, the story revolves around a man of humble means and huge biceps (Roddy Piper) drifting from place to place in a fruitless job search. He ends up working under the table at a construction site in Los Angeles, where he meets Keith David, who plays a musclebound worker usually seen sporting a loosely-fitted purple tank top. Roddy moves in with Keith in a shanty town/hobo camp situated across from a mysterious church. The church turns out to be the base of operations for a group of extremists who intend to distribute cases and cases of the aforementioned magical sunglasses in order to snap everyone out of the hypnosis these sneaky aliens have quietly cast upon America through the power of mass media.
When our man Rowdy Roddy accidentally discovers the power of the sunglasses, he intuitively knows what he has to do. Before anyone’s even stepped in to tell him what’s going on, Roddy quickly progresses from shock and awe at the images he’s seeing through his shades to a callous shooting rampage, killing alien body snatchers without a second thought. After kidnapping some creepy thin-lipped lady– and subsequently being shoved through the window of her hillside home– Roddy brushes himself off and decides he has to convince his purple prince Keith David to slip on the shades and have a look at the unbelievable truth.
You wouldn’t think this would be such a hard task to accomplish, but actually it requires a spectacular six minute long alley fight between the two men, rolling around on the ground for what seems like forever, slamming each other’s crotches until their collective sperm count falls below the Zac Efron level. The rest of the movie unfolds in a mostly unsurprising series of events borrowed from the 1983 alien invasion miniseries, V. This gem of a movie is full of unexplained plot nonsense, gratuitous catch phrases, superfluous action, bad acting, less-than-subtle metaphors and pretentious undertones. And it’s completely rad. Oh, and there are a bunch of silly moments of comic relief thrown in for good measure. When Roddy brings his thin-lipped hostage lady home, we see a glimpse of her hairy, shirtless gay neighbors, squinting apprehensively at the presence of Rowdy Roddy, and then turning their noses up with a huff at their distressed neighbor.
They Live is everything that Southland Tales tries to be and isn’t. Based on the frenetic, prententiously bonkers trailer, I had such high hopes for Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko. Much like They Live, Southland Tales is on the surface a retarded, campy, and excessive apocalyptic social commentary starring a former wrestler turned action star– but the difference is that while They Live is throughly entertaining on multiple levels and consistently fun, Southland Tales is just fucking boring. And embarrassing.  I regret dishing out $7.00 for a matinee screening of Kelly’s film, which has to be one of the biggest cinematic messes of all time– at least on such a grand scale. Full of superficially cryptic dialogue that starts to drill a hole in your brain around the thirty-minute mark, an endless barrage of extremely unappealing aesthetic choices, and rambling plot threads that could’ve been exciting in spite of their pointlessness– but instead become boring under the cockiness of Kelly’s delusions of grandeur– Southland Tales takes all the fun out of its shittiness. If you’re thinking of seeing Southland to witness the sheer absurdity of its existence, don’t bother. Save yourself two and a half hours of tedium and rent John Carpenter’s They Live instead. Trust me, you’ll be better off. |
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers. Watching Magnolia at the age of 12 was a major turning point in my adolescent development, and single-handedly inspired my desire to become a filmmaker. I was lucky enough to work as a P.A. on the set of There Will Be Blood last August, after harassing Anderson at a rare public Q&A earlier in the year. I spent a lot of time on a dusty ranch near Palmdale operating the air conditioning unit, assisting the video assistant, and lugging buckets of fake oil from place to place. It was an intense, fascinating experience, and gave me an amazing first-hand perspective of the day-to-day realities of filmmaking.
I saw the completed film for the first time in its entirety on Monday night, and I’ve been slowly processing it ever since. As one can tell from the trailer alone, Blood is a complete departure from Anderson’s signature style, in both content and form. The distancing from his earlier work is deliberate, a definite attempt to approach filmmaking with a different aesthetic and with a fresh set of talent. Leaving the comfort zone payed off in spades: Blood is a precisely crafted minimalist masterpiece. In fact, I was surprised just how minimal it was, especially for a film that runs two and a half hours long and spans thirty years of California history. There was even less dialogue than had been laid out in the already sparse script, and several scenes of zealous theatricality had been toned down or removed entirely. By taking away the frog rain, pop songs, prosthetic dicks and decadent dialogue of his earlier films, Anderson has allowed himself to focus entirely on a careful study of the film’s anti-hero, Daniel Day Lewis’ magnificently callous Daniel Plainview.  Don’t get me wrong– I absolutely love the sugary opulence of the aforementioned filmic devices in Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love. I can’t get enough of Anderson’s magical realism, ADD ensembles and whimsical distractions– but with Blood he proves that beneath the surface-level bustle and embellishment, there is an undeniably epic foundation of cinematic talent at work. I wouldn’t call There Will Be Blood perfect: most glaringly for me, at least on the first viewing, were a few unexpected moments of misplaced humor that dampened the impact of crucial moments. I’d also be interested to know if Anderson was satisfied with trimming the film down to a “mere” 158 minutes, or if we’ll ever see a Coppola-esque four hour director’s cut. While it may not be a masterpiece, Blood is a terrific film– undoubtedly one of the best of the year– and an important step in Anderson’s slowly blooming canon of work.  On the technical side, Robert Elswit’s photography is gorgeous, and the monumentally unnerving score by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood brings the film to a place of transcendence. Nothing needs to be said of Daniel Day-Lewis’ brilliance– I can’t imagine anyone else taking home the Oscar this year– but it’s worth mentioning that Paul Dano really turned it out in a difficult role, skillfully portraying a preacher with major delusions of grandeur. Young Dillion Freasier was impressive as Daniel Day-Lewis’ melancholy progeny, especially for a non-show biz kid– Freasier was cast on location in Marfa, Texas. The Hollywood Reporter has a well-written review that’s worth a read, and for fellow P.T. Anderson devotees, there’s always Cigarettes and Red Vines. |
There was a hysteria last summer surrounding the impending release of Snakes on a Plane, because bloggers and film buffs alike had been waiting so long for for a truly modern camp masterpiece. You know the type– those shallow, extravagant, but unforgettable B-movies that become cult classics mostly on the basis of their sheer absurdity: Blacula, Xanadu, anything derided on “Mystery Science Theater” or lauded in one of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. Pulp Fiction, in fact, is in part responsible for this specific genre of cult classics almost vanishing for the past ten years.  There have been B-movies since Pulp Fiction– oh, how there have been shitty films– but Tarantino brought about a sea change that changed the landscape of bad moies. By expressing his love for the absurdist conventions of so many bygone camp classics, he created a sense of hyper-awareness about those selfsame dazzling, creative elements in B-cinema.  Wes Craven’s Scream is equally culpable for bringing this double-edged sword of self-awareness to modern B-movies. Scream made filmic meta-criticism an extremely popular parlor trick, and inadvertantly spawned a whole franchise of films (starting with Scary Movie and continuing with no end in sight) devoted solely to the purpose of lampooning genre films.  This new era of heightened awareness has in effect forced genre films to walk a tight-rope between bland, straightforward believability, and tired, reference-dependent satire. The original movies that come out these days don’t dare risk getting their toes wet in the land of reckless creativity. They’re afraid of being called out on their capricious, irrational natures, as if cinematic indulgence were a bad thing. People just don’t like their fiction to be as fake these days, and they like even less for their reality to be real. But, I digress. What I’m trying to get to here is Richard Kelly’s new film, Southland Tales. This seemingly disastrous disaster film will be all that Snakes on a Plane promised to be (yet failed to deliver, succumbing to a constant barrage of winks and nudges to let us know that it was in on the joke), and more. Here’s the trailer: Can you smell what The Rock is cooking? Sorry, I couldn’t not write that. Southland Tales is Kelly’s directorial follow-up to 2001’s cult classic Donnie Darko. Someone noticed how popular Darko was with the kids these days and decided to give Richard Kelly, a former frat boy and graduate of the University of Florida, 17 million dollars and complete artistic license for a follow-up. Five years later, the nearly three-hour long film premiered at Cannes, to nearly universally awful reviews. My favorite bit of angry wordsmithery on Southland Tales comes from TimeOut London’s Geoff Andrews: “Kelly’s interminable, incoherent and profoundly unrewarding apocalyptic sci-fi satire comes across as a messy mix of ideas (I use the word very loosely) filched from the Bible (Dwayne Johnson as JC, anyone?), ‘La Dolce Vita’, ‘Metropolis’… and might that be ‘The Fifth Element’ in there, too? Morally and metaphysically confused, unfunny, heavy-handed, and as prone to waste, excess, idiocy and decadence as the emphatically allegorical world it imagines, it comes across as the dopehead nerd hipster’s alternative to ‘The Da Vinci Code’. To quote a far less verbose source, a commenter on IMDb said that Southland Tales “felt like the longest, most expensive student film I’ve ever seen.” That’s kind of how I felt, just watching the trailer. The humor is cringeworthy (”You’re gonna have to wear a bullet-proof vest.”), the acting looks obnoxious, the dialogue is melodramatic (”It had to be this way.” “I know.”), and it’s packed with the kind of set pieces and guns-blazing blow ‘em up action numbers (mixed, of course, with pseudo-philosophical ruminations) that you’d expect from a college student’s screenplay.
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Note: I don’t usually write about things that I hate, because there’s really nothing productive that can come out of talking shit on the Internet. But for Shoot ‘Em Up, I will make a special exception, on the grounds that if I even convince one person not to see this movie, I might be able to stop some injustice in the world from going down.
What you may not garner from a glance at at the poster, or even by watching the relatively tame trailer, is that Shoot ‘Em Up is a completely fucked up, misogynistic, self-indulgent, hateful, and downright retarded piece of shit. Let me explain. There’s nothing innately wrong with gratuitous violence. For example: Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike are just a handful of modern filmmakers who employ over-the-top cinematic violence in clever, intelligent, and emotionally resonant ways. It can even be fun to watch violence-filled popcorn movies that have no real artistic credibility, which is exactly how I approached Shoot ‘Em Up as I entered the theater– prepared to share some thrills and a few laughs with my friends. Then, the lights dimmed. continue reading |
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Somewhere in Malawi, the African nation most widely known as Madonna’s adoption farm, a 19 year old who couldn’t afford to attend high school, and whose village had no electricity, built a windmill with materials discarded by his neighbors and a bicycle dynamo. He had never used a computer, but after his incredible DIY windmill caught some media attention, he now has his own blog! He was even flown out (his first time on a plane) to a TED conference in Tanzania, where he gave a lecture about his accomplishment. Makes you feel kind of lazy and spoiled, huh? + William Kamkwamba’s Malawi Windmill Blog
Fans of The New Beverly’s monthly Grindhouse night– or any fan of that sublime gray area between art and trash– should love MuderMystery on LiveJournal. This 20-year-old photo student from Illinois writes verbose essays on the best films you’ve never heard of. The obscure gems he spotlights often hail from the dusty corners of 1970s and 80s cinematic history, hiding in the oft-dismissed genres of horror, erotica, or experimental cinema. Take a minute to read his manifesto, “A Primer to Watching European Genre Cinema,” for a more thorough concept of what this MuderMystery is all about. If you ever think you’ve run out of movies to watch, check out MurderMystery’s convenient on-going list, “100 Films You Should Probably See.” + MuderMystery (NSFW)
Matthew Barnes’ graphic design work is pretty crazy rad. A recent graduate of the Liverpool School of Art, he has already worked with Anthem Magazine, Nike, Dazed & Confused, Diesel, and SXSW, among others. Check out the work he did for Arktip Magazine and his hand-customized Adidas sneakers. I also want the awesome hooded jacket he customized for the Nike “Performance Art” exhibition. The kid has talent! |
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a gay German curmudgeon workaholic cinematic visionary. In the short span of 17 years, he made 43 films, before burning out at the age of 37, when he took a lethal overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. He was allegedly found slumped over an unfinished draft of his latest screenplay. 1975’s Fox and His Friends is one of his best, most revered films. It’s the deceptively simple story of a proletariat gay carnival worker whose abrupt transition into a world of bourgeois assholes spells certain disaster. The normally rubenesque Fassbinder dropped an impressive amount of weight to takes on the role of Fox, our hapless love-blinded hero, conned into misery by his newfound friends. He portrays the character with such nuance and integrity that it’s hard to believe that Fox, with all of his faults and charms, could be the victim of Fassbinder’s own cruel design. The film is structured brilliantly, its shots composed in an alien, stacked aesthetic in which relationships are visually fragmented by mirrors, bodies, and a variety of stray set pieces. The enclosed, self-consciously stagey settings of this and other Fassbinder films would be drawn upon by Wong Kar Wai for his similarly constricted-feeling In the Mood for Love. It’s an amazing film and an often overlooked piece of gay history. So go rent it! Check out more pictures after the jump. |
Brand Upon the Brain! is a new silent film by Canadian director Guy Maddin. It’s about a brother and sister living on a mysterious island under the tyranny of their unstable mother who runs an orphanage in the cellar of an old light house. A lesbian Nancy Drew, wireless two-way gramophones, and a horrible youth serum are just some of the absurd delights you’ll find in Brand’s unpredictable narrative. I just saw it this weekend with live accompaniment by a fourteen-piece orchestra, a castrato, three foley artists, and guest narration by Udo Kier. If you get the chance to see the live show, I implore you to take it. There’s nothing else quite like it. It’ll be presented tomorrow night in L.A. one final time before they start showing the standard version with a recorded soundtrack (narrated by Isabella Rosselini). |
There’s the end of the world movie, and then there’s his closely related brother, the post-apocalypse movie. They both bring us to a familiar world that has gone beyond critical mass, but post-apocalyptic cinema allows us to catch our breath and examine things on the fringe more carefully, without the frantic pacing of an impending doom. Here I will present to you two of my favorite post-apocalyptic films: 1975’s misogynistic Don Johnson spectacular, A Boy and His Dog, and the more pensive, breathtaking 1985 offering, The Quiet Earth. continue reading |
I know I’m a little late on the bandwagon here, since this came out several weeks ago– but when I first saw the trailer for Year of the Dog, I thought it was just going to be another quirky pastel-colored romantic comedy. I was pleasantly surprised to discover an altogether original film that is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. Chuck & Buck writer Mike White presents the audience with another character propelled on a path towards anti-social behavior, but the difference here is that we actually care about her, not in the least due to Molly Shannon’s stellar performance. In fact, everyone is amazing in Year of the Dog. It’s not easy to juggle comedy and earnestness, but Shannon, Laura Dern and especially Peter Sarsgaard do just that with unexpected nuance. With less talented performers, it would have been easy to simply laugh at the characters without feeling any connection with them. And they couldn’t have asked for a better venue to display their talents than through White’s thoughtful and authentic script. As a first-time director, too, he shows off a keen sense for comedic timing and striking compositions. But I’ll stop gushing and simply command you all to see this film as soon as possible. Seriously, like, leave now. At these prices, tickets won’t last long. |
