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Maybe it's just me, but I always saw the film much more Lovecraftian than folk or pagan (as in real-world beliefs). In the film's context, it's a pagan thing but to qualify as folk (to me, at least) it would need to have its roots in reality instead of being pure fiction invented for the story. In any case, it's such a beautifully shot movie.
Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom
Urgh. Count Me In is a garbage documentary. Supposedly about great drummers, there's an inexplicable amount of amateur youtube footage of amateurs here. Like a quota. But my biggest beef is the complete absense of drummers from the entire spectrum of R&B/Soul/Funk genre of music. Like those weren't essential vectors of genius drumming. No mention at all of Al Jackson Jr, Benny Benjamin, Richard Pistol Allen, Clyde Stubblefield, Jabo Starks, Tiki Fulwood, Roger Hawkins, Jerome Brailey, Ziggy Modeliste, Greg Errico, Mike Shrieve, Harold Ray Brown, Tony Thompson, Bobby Z, Dennis Chambers, etc, etc. Not even of Dave Lombardo since the doc's heavy leaning toward metal.
Two irritating examples: the Foo Fighter guy talking about his first drumming gig as "like, literally a lightning bolt". Literally. Like, this stoned hipster dude literally doesn't understand how language works. And the quote "Guys pick up a guitar to get laid. Girls pick up the drums because they want to." I'm not sure if that's more insulting to male guitarists or to girl musicians of any other instrument. Either way, it's kinda a fcking stupid thing to say, and for whatever reason this doc seems to encourage saying these kinds of stupid things.
Two irritating examples: the Foo Fighter guy talking about his first drumming gig as "like, literally a lightning bolt". Literally. Like, this stoned hipster dude literally doesn't understand how language works. And the quote "Guys pick up a guitar to get laid. Girls pick up the drums because they want to." I'm not sure if that's more insulting to male guitarists or to girl musicians of any other instrument. Either way, it's kinda a fcking stupid thing to say, and for whatever reason this doc seems to encourage saying these kinds of stupid things.
Sometimes, you need the Devil to come down to where you work and slap the cocks out your sockets.
Speaking of cocksockets...
Speaking of cocksockets...
MKS is definitely wrong about Annette - a marvelously dark take on toxic ego and exploitation in show business culture - but I will agree that it isn't as good as Holy Motors.
It was even worse than I’d believed the first time.
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So what's the score here?
I think you, crumbs, might be the only other person here who shares my utter disdain for Baby Driver. I hated that film when I saw it in the theater, and wrote a pan about the disasterous film debut by Jared Kushner, and was roundly *tsk*ed by the community, because "apparently" (as in not very apparent to me at all), this Bay-Bay is supposed to be spectrumish or something and therefore he was supposed to be a vacuous charmhole? Once again my latent ableism has damned me to a debilitating disadvantage here. I should probably steer clear of the eventual Spielberg version of West Side Story that will have Ansel Elgort (*fffffffffffffffffffffff*) doing more of whatever he's supposed to be doing, so as to not further incriminate my hateful prejudices.
MKS is definitely wrong about Annette - a marvelously dark take on toxic ego and exploitation in show business culture - but I will agree that it isn't as good as Holy Motors.
I didn't "hate" Rocketman, but it definitely falls into that category of garish mediocrity that I know you find useless. None of these types of celebrity bioflicks are ever actually about the human beings involved but about the elaborate media mythology they've persistently constructed for themselves. These films are celebrations of the myths rather than examinations of the artists. The kind of audiences who aren't interested in documentaries, which tend to be far more illuminating and insightful, are exactly the audiences who want to see the myths rather than the facts. Unfortunately, there's a whole slate of recent documentaries (I won't bother to name them, but you can usually see their allegience to the myth on the poster) that have also chosen to curate the myth rather than reveal the person, and usually all of these kinds of films have a direct hand involved by those most interested in preserving these myths (the estate, for example). Probably the most flattering thing I can say about Rocketman is that it's generally much better than the even more tepid and chimeric Bohemian Rhapsody, released just prior, and I'm not sure how much generosity I granted Rocketman due to this slight relief. (Although I gave it a 7/10, I think, so it was a minimal gratuity.) I don't hold it against Egerton, an actor I've never been particularly impressed with, who was clearly cast precisely because he's better looking and in much better physical shape than Elton John ever was (no one wants to see the real Reggie's frogman-physique in an orgy), but I think he did a admirable job with what he was given to do. Anyway, better than Ansel Elgort, or whatever other actor anagram of a throat disease is out there.
I think you, crumbs, might be the only other person here who shares my utter disdain for Baby Driver. I hated that film when I saw it in the theater, and wrote a pan about the disasterous film debut by Jared Kushner, and was roundly *tsk*ed by the community, because "apparently" (as in not very apparent to me at all), this Bay-Bay is supposed to be spectrumish or something and therefore he was supposed to be a vacuous charmhole? Once again my latent ableism has damned me to a debilitating disadvantage here. I should probably steer clear of the eventual Spielberg version of West Side Story that will have Ansel Elgort (*fffffffffffffffffffffff*) doing more of whatever he's supposed to be doing, so as to not further incriminate my hateful prejudices.
MKS is definitely wrong about Annette - a marvelously dark take on toxic ego and exploitation in show business culture - but I will agree that it isn't as good as Holy Motors.
I didn't "hate" Rocketman, but it definitely falls into that category of garish mediocrity that I know you find useless. None of these types of celebrity bioflicks are ever actually about the human beings involved but about the elaborate media mythology they've persistently constructed for themselves. These films are celebrations of the myths rather than examinations of the artists. The kind of audiences who aren't interested in documentaries, which tend to be far more illuminating and insightful, are exactly the audiences who want to see the myths rather than the facts. Unfortunately, there's a whole slate of recent documentaries (I won't bother to name them, but you can usually see their allegience to the myth on the poster) that have also chosen to curate the myth rather than reveal the person, and usually all of these kinds of films have a direct hand involved by those most interested in preserving these myths (the estate, for example). Probably the most flattering thing I can say about Rocketman is that it's generally much better than the even more tepid and chimeric Bohemian Rhapsody, released just prior, and I'm not sure how much generosity I granted Rocketman due to this slight relief. (Although I gave it a 7/10, I think, so it was a minimal gratuity.) I don't hold it against Egerton, an actor I've never been particularly impressed with, who was clearly cast precisely because he's better looking and in much better physical shape than Elton John ever was (no one wants to see the real Reggie's frogman-physique in an orgy), but I think he did a admirable job with what he was given to do. Anyway, better than Ansel Elgort, or whatever other actor anagram of a throat disease is out there.
I generally can't tolerate movies whose soul function is to be cool. It always feels like some kind of charade I'm supposed to fall for. And Baby Driver is the thickest example of vapid coolness I can think of. It knows I'm looking and it can't help peacock pointlessly in front of me. And the less interested in it I become, the more its strut annoys me. It makes me think of a guitarist I used to live with in university, who from a distance seemed just about the coolest guy I had ever known. But once I saw his beauty regiment every night before he got on stage, the hours spent ironing his t shirt, cutting the split ends out of his hair, and gazing lovingly at his tattoo in the mirror, the more and more I felt like an idiot for being duped by it. It was all a show, and I will not be tricked again, Baby Driver.
And although I don't think Rocketman was trying to play it cool, it was still just as much of a lie to watch. And I don't mean it flubbing all of the facts of John's life (I generally don't care much about that). But it committed a sin that is a close cousin to 'cool'--being clever. Years ago, I read an interview with David Foster Wallace where he mentioned the best advice he was ever given as a young novellist was to stop trying to be so clever. At the time I didn't quite understand this. I viewed being clever as a princely virtue. But I definitely get it now. It's a similar posture to trying to look cool. Unless the cleverness is leading us to some kind of revelation, its just annoyingly ornamental. Unneccessary. A distraction from the films lack of soul. Sitting and watching all of Rocketman's stupid camera tricks that add nothing to the film beyond calling attention to themselves, aggravate me to the point that I become uncomfortable in my own skin. I get the night sweats just thinking about that stupid shot revolving around and around Elton John as he sits at his piano, giving us yet another fit of costume porn. It adds nothing to the experience of listening to John's music. It mistakes being frenetic for musical revelation. It's a trick. Like a rockstar fretting over a crease in his Indian motorcycle tshirt. Or a fat bald man in a Donald Duck outfit. Pointless. Silly. Embarrassing.
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Several hours to iron a t-shirt? WTF?
Apparently, their band page won't let me share photographs, so I can't show you examples of his best work.
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Apparently, their band page won't let me share photographs, so I can't show you examples of his best work.
This is unacceptable.
Seems I had this one in my personal archives. I'll let you guess which one spent the most time ironing his shirt.
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You said he looked cool from a distance, right? Shirtless motorcycle man wins that easily... but he also has no shirt...
The plot thickens.
The plot thickens.
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You said he looked cool from a distance, right? Shirtless motorcycle man wins that easily... but he also has no shirt...
The plot thickens.
The plot thickens.
The secret to deciphering this is that he really doesn't look cool from any distance. But he is completely unaware of this. Just like an 18 year old me.
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The secret to deciphering this is that he really doesn't look cool from any distance. But he is completely unaware of this. Just like an 18 year old me.
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Completely unacceptable.
Hey, you are talking about a well-established Canadian band who were inducted into the London Ontario Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside of Garth Hudson.
Now, keeping that in mind, just try and unacceptable this!
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I assume everybody else knows they're lame.
You could only hope. Afrowigs seem to make some immune to reality though.
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Bogarts mouth may have mostly been filled with smoke and marbles, but poetry was in there too. You might hardly think it belonged in such a place. And maybe it would have preferred to keep itself inside, away from the mean streets he lived in. But the brute force of his New York drawl would always eventually drag it out. By the hair. Slightly slurred and stepped on. But always a perfect morsel of words, shimmering like a pothole full of blood. Like rain gently soaking a greasy, old fedora.
No matter how hard-edged the genre of Film Noir sometimes appears to be, one of its most beautiful contradictions is its relationship with language, and the uneasy elegance it brings to its cynicism. Without it, its reliance on fists and bullets and betrayals would never dance. But with it, it becomes a perfectly composed world of uncertainties. It allows its characters to vividly articulate every contour of the moral wasteland that surrounds them. Then, if you allow them a few more puffs on their cigarette, they’ll tell you all about the many ways it has warped them. It doesn’t matter how slow the articulation of some lumbering henchman might be. Or how wet and dripping the appeals for mercy become upon the lips of some rat-faced toady. Even when seemingly inarticulate, the characters in Noir speak in images and allusions and insults that are all the streetlight one needs to make out the shape of their souls.
And then they’ll sock you with a fist.
In the best examples of the genre, the effect is a miraculous balance between the artificial and the naturalistic. It is writing of the most thoughtful contemplation, eventually tumbling from the mouths of characters who only have enough time to spit these words out along with their teeth. As a result, it takes an almost perfect touch to make it work, or else it could easily go wrong. Maybe it would be a case of too much poetry. Or not enough grit. It’s a tricky mixture. Noir is a concoction that needs just the right proportions before its spilled over the rocks. It can dilute real easy. But has a necessary cheapness that forbids us from ever drinking it straight.
And this will very much be the highwire act that Cutter’s Way attempts in the streets of 1980’s Santa Barbara, and it’s hard to say if it entirely succeeds on these merits alone. The grit is always either too much or too little. It will fluctuate between an overkill of gruesomness that dumps semen crusted bodies in trashcans one minute. Then, before that queasiness subsides, a character arrives wearing a costume shop eye patch, and there is a sense that maybe all these sticky evils are being presented to us from the game book of some murder/dinner party.
As for the poetry, it has already been pre-fed to the actors, and they seem to have stored an abundance of it in the pockets of their cheeks. Their faces absolutely bulge with it. And when it is spoken, their endless turns of phrase will sound thick with edits and notes scribbled all around the margins. If it illuminates anyone's soul, it is mostly that of the screenwriters, which will appear as a less than enthralling silhouette hunched over a typewriter, pulling at their hair, desperately thumbing through some dog-eared Dashiell Hammet paperback. And, ultimately, the fruit of its labors will be suspect. We ask for characters, and we get a tangle of ten-dollar words. And when we ask for poetry, the hat Cutter’s Way throws into the ring is already damp from memories of better scripts.
But somehow these unbalanced ingredients become a necessity when we begin to recognize how unrepentantly cynical a film this is. There is an inflexibility to the direction its narrative takes, forcing its audience to follow the assurances of its alcoholic and paranoid characters that we are on the road towards some kind of street justice. And at the end of this road, there will in fact be a villain, even though Cord (the stone-faced oil magnate we occasionally will see lurking in the background) is a character we hardly have any real stakes in. We are unsure what he is actually responsible for. And we can’t be sure exactly why we are meant to fear and despise him At least not beyond the increasingly frenzied conspiracies touted by the film’s titular character, a disabled and extremely disturbed Vietnam veteran played by John Heard.
Without these ganglier elements, the sometimes overripe dialogue and the tonal shifts which make us continually feel we are standing on some kind of fault line between the despairing and the absurd, Cutter’s Way might just feel like a third-rate Chinatown. But with its many imperfections in full view, somehow, maybe even by mistake, it gives the film an almost B Movie viscerality. The kind of clenched fist we might expect shooting out at us from a Samuel Fuller film, even as we contemplate the morose vibe it seems to have lifted from Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves”.
Because of all this, it’s possible Cutter’s Way is forcing me to re-evaluate the essentials I once thought to be so necessary. Maybe, in fact, its slight variation on Noirs fundamental elements is exactly right coming after the age of American grindhouse and exploitation films. Maybe for us to truly embrace the loner in such a society, what we need instead is something a little crass and occasionally even silly. It’s possible grit and poetry simply don’t cut it anymore. At least not when basked in the neon glow of 1980’s Santa Barbara. This kind of place requires something a little meaner. And dumber.
No matter how hard-edged the genre of Film Noir sometimes appears to be, one of its most beautiful contradictions is its relationship with language, and the uneasy elegance it brings to its cynicism. Without it, its reliance on fists and bullets and betrayals would never dance. But with it, it becomes a perfectly composed world of uncertainties. It allows its characters to vividly articulate every contour of the moral wasteland that surrounds them. Then, if you allow them a few more puffs on their cigarette, they’ll tell you all about the many ways it has warped them. It doesn’t matter how slow the articulation of some lumbering henchman might be. Or how wet and dripping the appeals for mercy become upon the lips of some rat-faced toady. Even when seemingly inarticulate, the characters in Noir speak in images and allusions and insults that are all the streetlight one needs to make out the shape of their souls.
And then they’ll sock you with a fist.
In the best examples of the genre, the effect is a miraculous balance between the artificial and the naturalistic. It is writing of the most thoughtful contemplation, eventually tumbling from the mouths of characters who only have enough time to spit these words out along with their teeth. As a result, it takes an almost perfect touch to make it work, or else it could easily go wrong. Maybe it would be a case of too much poetry. Or not enough grit. It’s a tricky mixture. Noir is a concoction that needs just the right proportions before its spilled over the rocks. It can dilute real easy. But has a necessary cheapness that forbids us from ever drinking it straight.
And this will very much be the highwire act that Cutter’s Way attempts in the streets of 1980’s Santa Barbara, and it’s hard to say if it entirely succeeds on these merits alone. The grit is always either too much or too little. It will fluctuate between an overkill of gruesomness that dumps semen crusted bodies in trashcans one minute. Then, before that queasiness subsides, a character arrives wearing a costume shop eye patch, and there is a sense that maybe all these sticky evils are being presented to us from the game book of some murder/dinner party.
As for the poetry, it has already been pre-fed to the actors, and they seem to have stored an abundance of it in the pockets of their cheeks. Their faces absolutely bulge with it. And when it is spoken, their endless turns of phrase will sound thick with edits and notes scribbled all around the margins. If it illuminates anyone's soul, it is mostly that of the screenwriters, which will appear as a less than enthralling silhouette hunched over a typewriter, pulling at their hair, desperately thumbing through some dog-eared Dashiell Hammet paperback. And, ultimately, the fruit of its labors will be suspect. We ask for characters, and we get a tangle of ten-dollar words. And when we ask for poetry, the hat Cutter’s Way throws into the ring is already damp from memories of better scripts.
But somehow these unbalanced ingredients become a necessity when we begin to recognize how unrepentantly cynical a film this is. There is an inflexibility to the direction its narrative takes, forcing its audience to follow the assurances of its alcoholic and paranoid characters that we are on the road towards some kind of street justice. And at the end of this road, there will in fact be a villain, even though Cord (the stone-faced oil magnate we occasionally will see lurking in the background) is a character we hardly have any real stakes in. We are unsure what he is actually responsible for. And we can’t be sure exactly why we are meant to fear and despise him At least not beyond the increasingly frenzied conspiracies touted by the film’s titular character, a disabled and extremely disturbed Vietnam veteran played by John Heard.
Without these ganglier elements, the sometimes overripe dialogue and the tonal shifts which make us continually feel we are standing on some kind of fault line between the despairing and the absurd, Cutter’s Way might just feel like a third-rate Chinatown. But with its many imperfections in full view, somehow, maybe even by mistake, it gives the film an almost B Movie viscerality. The kind of clenched fist we might expect shooting out at us from a Samuel Fuller film, even as we contemplate the morose vibe it seems to have lifted from Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves”.
Because of all this, it’s possible Cutter’s Way is forcing me to re-evaluate the essentials I once thought to be so necessary. Maybe, in fact, its slight variation on Noirs fundamental elements is exactly right coming after the age of American grindhouse and exploitation films. Maybe for us to truly embrace the loner in such a society, what we need instead is something a little crass and occasionally even silly. It’s possible grit and poetry simply don’t cut it anymore. At least not when basked in the neon glow of 1980’s Santa Barbara. This kind of place requires something a little meaner. And dumber.
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