The Filmic Sublime

This clip from Jia Zhangke's Still Life makes up for all the bad movies I've seen this month. Just to set it up: a woman has been searching across China to find her husband to ask for a divorce. She finally finds him and they are talking to each other in this dilapidated tenement block and sharing a piece of candy. What happens next is as close to the sublime as I've seen in film in a very long time.

'Yo veo dead people' or Beetlejuice en espagñol

Had loads of caffeine last night to get hyped up to see the 'super scary' The Orphanage. Super scary as in: What has happened to people's taste?!?! I checked the reviews again this morning to make sure I hadn't imagined them. Still a 4.3/5 star rating and still lots of reviewers going on about how scary and moving it is. Not super and not scary. OK, freaky social worker with bottle lens glasses and Geraldine Chaplin (offspring of legendary Charlie) as a psychic were creepy enough but that had nothing to do with horror, social workers and children of very famous people are just creepy by definition. So I am still left wondering what is the hype all about?! You can't be both a horror film (which is how this film has been pitched by Warner Bros, whose corporate finger prints can be seen all over this movie) AND be a moving fairy tale, that's a very tough combo. And for those of you who didn't see every next scene coming a mile away: you need to spend more time in the cinema!!! This isn't even Guillermo del Toro, but a GdT production (i.e., here's a bunch of consolation money for not winning the Oscar for the truly deserving Pan's Labyrinth, which IS a very moving fairy tale without being a horror film). El Orfanato is essentially a fluffed up Mexican version of Beetlejuice (which I do rate highly) featuring a mini-Donnie Darko without bunny ears or a reworking of the unbearably pretentious The Others by Alejandro Amenábar (which is the original Spanish Beetlejuice). As far as 'we are dead people trapped in an old creaky house with doorknobs that turn in the dark by themselves' scary the ropey old black and white Deborah Kerr vehicle The Innocents (1961) still haunts:

What was scary was getting off the night bus and seeing my neighbor standing there sending off a friend. That's uncanny considering there are millions of people in the city of London. Also ran into friend's parents at the bus stop the other day and they were visiting from New York. Bus stops as portals: next horror film scenario after the mutant pandas and giant penguins stories...

Happy Bank Holiday!

OK, so Easter is a big scam like all other holidays, except we get an unusual number of days off so hooray. The big JC dies so let's eat huge amounts of chocolate bunnies, eggs, marshmallow chicks, etc. and stuff ourselves silly because Christmas was a while ago now: 'whenever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there will be obscene gorging involved'. Hey pass that body and blood of Christ... Protestants said that Catholics were essentially cannibals because they were so hung up on the whole transubstantiation business. Vampires too in that case.

Anyway, Easter in London this year was full of freak snow storms that melt on contact. It's like fake snow or something. One minute it's a blizzard, next minute it's just another cold, dank, gray English winter day. I think I'm trapped in someone's snowdome... This Easter I went to a baptism which was followed by biblical amounts of drinking and a very nice lamb (of God?). Then read this story about a praying dog bumping up numbers at a Buddhist temple, so now the verdict is in: organised religion is full of freaks from fundamentalists to UFO worshippers (yes, this reminds me that the last time I was in the USofA I saw a 'documentary' on TV about UFOS in the Bible, no you couldn't make that kind of crap up...). We can thank the 'History' Channel for this enlightening programme (official brainwashing machine of the American Right and producers of the equally dubious History of Britain with Simon Schama)...

Oh, on the topic of documentaries and in keeping with all that seasonal redemption yada yada, went to see Rene Vautier's most excellent Afrique 50 (1950) at the Tate Modern Paradise Now film series. The Tate clips were uneven ranging from the poetic sublime (Moholy-Nagy's film The Old Port at Marseilles) and the political sublime (a piece on the S.C.U.M Manifesto) to the outright stupid (both contemporary video artists should be tied up in an auditorium and forced to watch their own self-indulgent crap for 24 continuous hours). But Vautier's terrifyingly prophetic film is still amazing and well worth the watch if you can handle the clip without subtitles, puts Fritz Lang's Metropolis to shame (and that is one of my all time favourite films, I even liked Giorgio Moroder's remake too). OK, not to end Easter on a downer, here's a clip of baby pandas to cheer everyone up (even if I think they are being cloned en masse in Chinese labs, fantastic horror film scenario in the making here and yes, the first two victims of the mad GM panda will be those two giggling girls in the clip)...

Super Simpsonize Me

It's been a very long couple of weeks and there are many things to report on and nowhere obvious to start so I combined two highlights: Slavoj Zizek's pay-per-view lecture series Ideology Embedded at Birkbeck in London and the Simpsonizer. Well, at least that's what I wanted to do, but for a man who is everywhere all the time, it is strangely hard to find any hi-res photos of him, so you will have to do with this one of me.

Zizek's lectures were nuts as usual, but two memorable quotes include:
1. 'When I'm ready to take questions, I will distribute them'.
2. 'Without 1968, there would have been no Bill Gates'.
Highlights included:
Analysis of the 'ideology glasses' scene in John Carpenter's They Live; identity vs. representation as demonstrated in the 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' scene in Cabaret; comparison of Joan Baez singing 'Joe Hill' and Terminator 2 and the theme of martyrs and posthumous collective organisation in the line 'what they can never kill went on to organize'; explanation of the dialectic through the birdcage trick in the Prestige; naming La Vita è Bella and Schindler's List as two of the world's all-time worse films (too ignoble to merit links); analysis of Lenin as a good matchmaker in Reds. I'm sure the book will be out soon, the guy writes them like most people eat candies.