You May Be Able to Get There From Here

I just found this extensive interview with Lars Von Trier from a few years back, in Sight and Sound, a translation of an interview in Die Ziet:

Die Zeit: Lars von Trier, who in your opinion has the power in an interview situation, the interviewer or the interviewee?

Lars von Trier: I could try to insist on a symbolic power. I could lay down the rule that during this talk you have to address me as King Lars. I could threaten to leave the room if you disobeyed. But that would do nothing to change the fact that in an interview, the same rules apply as in cinema. No matter what happens during the filming process, the power is in the hands of the editor. You havethe scissors in your hands so you have absolute power.

[...]

[Question...]

Lars von Trier: I come from a family of communist nudists. I was allowed to do or not do what I liked. My parents were not interested in whether I went to school or got drunk on white wine. After a childhood like that, you search for restrictions in your own life.

But communists actually have very strict rules.

[...]

[Question...]

Lars von Trier: That’s true, but that’s where things start to get very complicated. All my life I’ve been interested in the discrepancy between philosophy and reality, between conviction and its implementation. The general assumption is that all people are able to differentiate more or less equally between good and evil. But if this is the case, why does the world look like it does? Why have all the good intentions of my parents come to nothing. And why do my own good intentions lead to nothing?

There’s that wonderful guiding principle: always leave the toilette as you found it. Or: do unto others as you would have them do to you. Kant was right. It’s just that his imperative is a bit unspecific. But it is nevertheless one of the best guidelines for how people should live together. Apart from that I believe a society should treat its weaker members well. And that is not something that happens over there in America.

Die Ziet: Should we be thinking more about George W. Bush‘s sexuality?

Lars Von Trier: He’s a sexual being too and his psyche is very important for us all. I think he’s in love with Condoleezza Rice. And he’s dreaming of being whipped by her.

Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove; cinephilic teenagers of the 1970s had Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Taxi Driver; cinephilic teenagers of the 1980s had Repo Man, Blue Velvet, Stranger than Paradise; cinephilic teenagers of the 1990s had Rushmore.

I enjoyed reading Colin Marshall explanation of what Wes Anderson’s Rushmore meant/means for film .

Eleven years on from Rushmore’s release, Anderson’s detractors have unfairly (but not wholly groundlessly) labeled him a shallow, finicky production design fetishist fatally attached to a dwindling stable of pet themes; a 2007 Onion headline sardonically heralds that a new Wes Anderson film features “Deadpan Delivery, Meticulous Art Direction, Characters With Father Issues”. He has defended himself, and articulately so, as merely a craftsman who understands and accepts what he wants to make and thus looks to improve with each iteration rather than to diversify for the sake of diversification, much as a cabinetmaker seeks to produce a superior cabinet on each job instead of, say, a shoe rack just for the hell of it. (In this, he’s very much the artistic cousin of the criminally under-recognized Sang-soo Hong.) Should he deny the accusations of deadpan delivery, meticulous art direction and characters with father issues? He shouldn’t, and in any case probably couldn’t. Admirably, he owns them.

[...]

Rushmore has, after countless viewings over more than a decade, revealed its imperfections: it gets too plotty, especially around the Max-Blume rivalry; the ending’s a bit neat; many sequences use thirty shots where one would have done. But time has not diminished its aesthetic and human richness, nor the refreshing boldness of its willingness to simply be itself, a work that exists on its own terms without dictating them to the audience. Walter Benjamin once wrote that all great works of literature dissolve a genre or found a new one. Though of a different medium, Rushmore is indeed a great work and thus does the former, the latter or quite possibly both. But, much more importantly, it was the first film ever to feel as if it were made for me. And I’m hardly alone in the sentiment.

There’s a certain brand of movie that I most enjoy. Some people call them “Puzzle Movies.” Others call them “Brain Burners.” Each has, at some point or another, been referred to as “that flick I watched while I was baked out of my mind.”

The Morning News survey’s films that puzzle us:

Mindfuck Movies.

I’m keen on watching The Dark City and finish David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which I’m currently watching.

I don’t read comics, but I try not to discount the form. I read Watchmen around 5 years ago at the behest of a friend, an avid comic book and graphic novel reader. I’ve not decided if I’ll see Watchmen, the movie: When I first saw a teaser for it, I felt disinterest, with a touch of disgust. But in thinking more about the film the other night, I remember reading the novel-bound edition of the comic over an evening with no breaks. It was the first time I truly appreciated the graphic novel form. I was also just emotionally involved in the story.

The series creator, Alan Moore , it is argued– and I just accept this valuation– its a master of the comic form. A craft that often remains just this, but with a touch like Moore’s becomes art. Of course, much can be said about the denigration of comics as an art form, just an one can point to the many great science fiction, mystery, and espionage writers that have been pigeonholed as genre fiction writers. Denigration of this other beast, the adaptation of comics to blockbuster films, however, may be too little.

I recently read a exposition on the act of adaptation by Salmun Rushdie, which lead me to think about Watchmen and comic-to-film adaptations in the first place. Of course, comic books are often adaptations of adaptations. This is sometimes the commercial reuse of intellectual property in the form of characters and stories; but there is also an mythological element in the reworking of superheroes and villains to square with contemporary issues. In the case of Moore’s watchmen, DC Comics made an acquisition from Charlatan Comics, a cast of characters. Moore was then hired to adapt these character’s for a DC series. He choose to take a group of status-quo super heroes and make them dysfunctional anti-heroes. As Grady Hendrix writes of the comic:

Watchmen made the point that superheroes, realistic or otherwise, were beside the point. Its costumed do-gooders are retired, impotent, or insane, and they generally do more harm than good [...]  This [is a] surprising development, the comic reframed itself: Watchmen isn’t about crimefighters coming out of retirement and taking up their rightful mantles, but about how they never should have existed in the first place. The nuclear war they’re trying to prevent is almost entirely their fault in the first place, and the arms race that preceded it was accelerated by their mere existence.

Last summer’s comic blockbuster, The Dark Knight, also considered whether a non-super hero should retire. The comic book release of The Dark Knight was released at the same time as Watchmen, and the two works are interesting companions. They shared critical acclaim in the mid-Eighties– both perceived as revolutionary in artistic process and narrative. Also, they both take place– one figuratively– in New York city.  The Gotham milieu says many more things about our current condition, about American fear and politics in an age of terrorism. And whereas the effete watchmen either become the literal tools of Richard Nixon or hang up their capes, its natural to feel, as many critics have argued, that Batman’s heroism against terrorism is apologetic for the policy’s of Dick Cheney and the Bush Department of Justice.*

The Dark Knight is an exception to movies derived from comics though– they generally stink. They stink for many reasons, but in part they stink because the format doesn’t allow for hero’s to be deconstructed, as is done in The Watchmen series and, too a smaller extent, in The Dark Knight. I expect the movie retelling of the story will try to, despite its grit and frame-by-frame loyalty to the original, recast the Watchmen as heroes (not that their story ends heroically).  In the case of Watchmen, its doesn’t really seem to matter that the original work is masterpiece. As Dana Steven’s sumarizes, “the book’s spirit—its paranoia, its dark humor, and above all its bleak anti-triumphalism—has been squelched in the transition to a big-budget action epic.”

* I felt that this question in Christopher Nolan’s Batman was more provocative than allegorical. Thinking of its portrayal of torture and also a scene where the police, to their demise, neglect a suffering man because of his association with the Joker. (The Joker has given the man an implant of explosives.)

Some related readings:

• In Defense of the Blue Penis
• Is Watchmen the Next Dark Night
• The Watchmen Rorschach Test

Stephanie Zacharek reviews I’m Not There:

“I’m Not There” is Todd Haynes’ version of the question, framed not as a demand but as a ballad sung in the language of movies, as if the only way to get to the meaning of Dylan were through another type of song. This Dylan — this idea of Dylan — is, as the movie’s opening tells us, “Poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity,” although he is perhaps more a place than a person, an elusive destination that we — that is, those of us who love his music — keep traveling toward.

She also has and interview with the Director of the Film.

LD Beghtol of the Village Voice has a Control review that touches on Corbijn’s gaze towards Ian Curtis and Joy Division:

His long infatuation with Joy Division first went public when his photos of the band—made literally in Curtis’s final weeks—were shunned by the press as too strange, too arty; only after the singer’s death did these enigmatic images become widely known, making Corbijn famous in the process. Inevitably, then, Corbijn became the de facto image consultant to the burgeoning postmortem JD industry: Witness his risible late-’80s video for “Atmosphere,” in which dwarfish, robed, and hooded figures galumph through an arid sub-Bergmanesque landscape, intercut with stills of the young, then-clueless band. Corbijn’s later videos are often much less cack-handed than this one, making him an obvious (perhaps too obvious) choice for his much-postponed feature-length debut.

Read the article at the Village Voice.

Related:

A comprehensive review of the film can be found at Westminister Wisdom.

I just saw a well made documentary on Japanese host boys, a western Japanese sub-cultural phenomenon.

The film looks at (economically) exclusive clubs wherein younger women pay larges amounts of money ($2,000-10,000 a night) to spend time with handsome, youthful, and entertaining young men. For the most part, the women are paying for attention, but sex is also involved.

The men at these clubs seem youthfully resilient, yet tired and disillusioned. The men are very aware of the powers at play in what they do. They say forthrightly that they sell dreams and happiness in the form of romantic attention. The best liked and asked for of these men make $50,000 a month for their services.

Several of the hosting clubs have advertisements for the men online:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBXn48CY-vM&rel=1]

A rather interesting ripple in the story is that the majority of the women entertained at host boy clubs are themselves entertainers, whether hostesses, exotic dancers, or prostitutes (the categories bleed significantly). So much of the money they make entertaining men is spend on their on need for more-genuine friendship and sexual attention.

I’ll be posting more on this topic…

Additionally, if you have a Netflix account, this documentary is available for “Instant” watching online.