Young Werner Herzog
1. Hello, World
It was a gloomy California Thursday at midnight when I Kramered into the Cave, a large, dark, and windowless bedroom in the center of the dilapidated fraternity mansion I lived in for just under two years. It had been an evening of painting and whiskey drinking. I was on edge.
The puffed-up leather couch was crammed from arm to arm with glazy-eyed guys. I spotted the Cave’s inhabitant and landlord, a screenwriting major with whom I have a running dialogue, a vulgar back-and-forth that has something to do with cinema. His lit face turned towards me in the dark.
“
Star Trek,” he said.
“The new one,” I assumed. Not that I’ve seen the old ones. Old Star Trek always seemed like Alien CNN to me. He nodded. I sat on a pink metal chair a close friend stole from Del Taco years ago.
I have only watched J.J. Abram’s
Star Trek that once, and it’s possible that between the slow loss of my psychic whiskey forcefield and the poor design of the pink chair (the Del Taco chair might have been “free” but it’s still not something you want to sit on long), I was set against the movie from the start. By time it ended, I mostly complained about the imaginary cosmic substance (“Red Matter”) that resolved the plot and saved the main characters. Red Matter isn’t real. Red Matter has nothing to do with anything. We watched a whole shaky movie for that? I was being kind of a contrarian, sure, but I don’t think I was wrong.
As hoped, the screenwriter jumped in to confront me. He accused me of faulting a science fiction film for being fiction, of ignoring the craft of the narrative, of missing The Story, maybe the point altogether. I demanded a point, knowing full well that he was could have been right. He didn’t answer me.
This, in essence, is my relationship to contemporary American film. Even with a stiff drink first, things usually end in shouting – and after that I’m typically left feeling a little mean and out of touch.
Between 2004 and 2008, I developed my taste for movies through a devotion to a 3-disc mail-based Netflix account. I typically watched about three films a week on a DVD player up on the third floor of this colonial house built in the middle of a New Hampshire forest, away from everyone else, late at night. And I had nobody’s taste to answer to except my own. I was free to watch anything I liked.
I had devoured movies throughout childhood but in 2004 when DVDs began to arrive in the mail, my mom quit policing the contents of the rentals. I moved from spectacle films to prestige pictures. I checked movies off the AFI Top 100. I moved from “classics” to American independents, then to European auteurs, then into niche genres, camp, kitsch, and the avant-garde.
I attend the USC School of Cinematic Arts as an undergraduate film production major. In May 2012, I will graduate. I will presumably attempt to enter the workforce as a paid professional contributing (in whatever small way) to film culture. I spend every day writing or filming movies. I have not been to a movie theater in months.
I’m not proud of it. It never used to be a problem. But sometime between 2010 and 2011 I lost interest. I think it happened after
Iron Man 2.
Which transitions perfectly into a digressive short rant:
I can't justify dropping twenty dollars on
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I don’t care what Metacritic says, there is no way I can’t use my afternoon for something more enjoyable and rewarding than that 43 year-old tentpole prequel. Right? How many times can you stick “of the” into a title? Our film culture is a hostage held in a chokehold by deranged blue mutant merchandising objects and alien robot car merchandising objects that happened to be popular in the 1980s. Plastic toy nostalgia is our contribution to history. Hasbro is sucking up our brains through curly straws.
But I want to keep up. I realize that two of the last four movies I paid to see were
Annie Hall and
Boyz N the Hood, from 1977 and 1991 respectively. This really doesn’t say much for my engagement with contemporary mainstream film.
Okay, so, even as I dismiss the Gorilla Planet Picture, I realize that I shouldn’t. No person should spend their life watching obscure rarities alone on a computer. No diet, cultural or otherwise, should be so one-sided. Everything in moderation, as the politicians and the Moralists say.
Maybe we shouldn’t listen to them. Maybe I just shouldn’t feel cultural nostalgia at 21. I suspect nostalgia to be deeply harmful to one’s character and soul.
But still, I make videos, I work in film, I care very deeply about these things. Years ago, I found a quote in a book I'd taken out from the cinema library here:
In Church only one drama is performed and always one and the same, year in, year out, while in the cinema next door you will be shown the Easters of heathen, Jew and Christian, their historic sequence, with their similarity of ritual. The cinema amuses, educates, delights the imagination by images, and liberates you from the need of crossing the Church door. The cinema is a great competitor not only of the public-house, but of the Church. Here is an instrument which we must secure at all costs!
- Release from a 1928 Soviet conference on socialist realism and the cinema
I need to put it out there that I am not political and even though this 2011 and I have no fear of Joseph McCarthy, I can’t confess that I’ve ever had anything that could be called an interest in communism. But I was blown away by the explicit connection between the Church and the Cinema. Film had been my church for so long.
I hope Monsters' Church will serve as an outlet for my weekly thoughts on contemporary American film, both the mainstream and the art house. I will try my hardest to remain objective and open to every film I watch and to expand on my responses in entertaining, intelligent, and unpredictable ways. My responses will branch out into culture, history, music, literature, science, whatever I'm dealing with at the time and whatever the film inspires. I hope to develop an educated response to American film in the fall of 2011 and to engage with the cinema of the present as I continue develop my own filmmaking style on the side.
* * *
For full disclosure, this thing is currently being written for an English class, and I did what I could to make a rambling manifesto in My Own Voice that also fulfilled certain requirements. As such, I have to shout out some inspiration here.
I've been reading
Jonathan Rosenbaum for five years and
Roger Ebert for longer. These two guys have formed a lot of what I see when I watch movies and I don’t think I’m alone there.
The
Film section at the Slant Magazine Blog is a source of great writing and although I might take a more casual tone, I read and absorb a lot of their reviews and features. Also, I've recently been hitting
Incite Cinema and the
Film section at The Quietus for some great commentary and interviews, respectively. That’s all for now.
Anna Karina
2. Some Thoughts on Slate and Blog Convention
At first, I thought that long-form personal film review blogs weren’t out there. I’ve been reading film criticism since I was 15, and here I was unable to find the sites I knew had to be out there. I’m 21, I’ve spent a lot of time researching on the Internet, and I suspect that I know when something is scarce.
Almost every site I ran across falls into one of three categories: a defunct film review blog that ran for a couple weeks and imitated the format of newspaper caption reviews of old; highly professional film blog collectives, sites dedicated to thorough and mostly academic analysis of the Western (North American and European) film festival circuit; or film news blogs, whether entertainment/celebrity-centric, art house production-centric, or some industry internet trade paper. But when I was looking for a like-minded blog to compare to my own, I couldn’t find one that consistently exploited all of the resources I want to exploit, which include academic resources but also everyday life, cultural trends, film history, literature, other blogs, etc. It seems as if individuals don’t often publish their reactions to films as they relate to the subjects in their lives, whether intellectual or artistic or personal.
That’s not to say there aren’t any out there. But cineastes (lovers of cinema) are typically obsessives. For whatever reason, the art form draws a loud, sophisticated, and increasingly more organized community of Internet commentators. The conversations that come out of this community are often enlightening, but almost always medium-specific. By which I mean, the people that comment tend to have a vast knowledge of film’s aesthetic history and development but rarely discuss films as they relate to larger themes and ideas. If you’re looking for an incredible source of discussion from this community, sign up for
Mubi. You’ll have no trouble finding short but often insightful or sharp criticism from the crowd.
But I don’t want to compare this to a comment board. This is just me doing my thing with concessions to my Academic Overlords. So I chose to compare my project to a more conventional site, but one whose writing and voice I respect and hope to emulate, to a certain degree.
Slate’s House Next Door Film Blog is a well-presented collection of contemporary film criticism and features written in a colloquial vernacular grounded in academic rigor. The reviews aren’t tough to read and you’ll get a lot out of them.
Any film review you choose on the site is liable to be well written and well researched and intelligent and all the things you expect when you read a piece of professional writing. What sets the site apart for me is the depth of the reviewer’s engagement with the film culture they belong to. By that I mean that these people know their shit. They don’t spend much of the review “describing what happens,” (which, by the way, is not a good way to talk about a piece of art) nor to they spend most of time on their adjective selection (apparently “delightful” is a popular one among independent bloggers whenever something French comes out). Like my most-trusted Review Gods Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert, they relate their experiences with each film to their experiences of other films by the same director or other films within the same vein. This
review for
Grindhouse is a great example of the method: talk about why the movies fail or succeed based on how they relate to other films. That’s how it’s done, that’s the convention. And if you do it well, you’ve written good criticism.
Here’s the thing: film reviews don’t typically adventure outside of an evaluation of the work at hand. As with most other sites, the endless procession of Films To Be Reviewed results in a collection of solid and trustworthy film commentary, but often limits the site’s writers’ ability to talk at length about how these films fit into their own personal experiences or interests, which, I think, is what makes art interesting in the first place. To get all we can out of a film, we need to bring more to it than just our experiences with other films. Unless you’re at a Quentin Tarantino film (and this is in no way an insult – unlike the House blog, I love
Death Proof), chances are the director wants you to think outside of the world of movies.
Academic, film-specific commentary is incredibly useful for someone like me, a student of the craft, but it does nothing to invite participation from any kind of layman. My hope is that art house or festival cinema can find a new audience of youthful viewers who are dissatisfied with the experiences they encounter at the tentpole movies. As the moving image finds its place on the web, I believe this will happen. I hope the medium will be re-energized. But I think we need intelligent and non-medium-specific commentary to make this happen. We need bridges to those viewers.
The goal here, I guess, is to bring the same kind of breadth of emotional and intellectual influence to my commentary as the filmmaker brought to the film. And reviews have done that. Ebert’s take on
The Tree of Life was unsurprisingly one of the most touching reactions I read. He talked about the film’s success in evoking a memory of a very particular time and place, something that most online film reviewers (who generally didn’t grow up in 1950s middle America) have no frame of reference for. His review helps me to see the art and the man experiencing more clearly.
Here is what I want: I want criticism that takes the art and speaks honestly about how it relates to the intellectual ideas and personal hang-ups that inspire the critic. When we write reviews like that, reviews that take film make it about the world, we draw ourselves closer and closer to an understanding of our cultural identity and the people we imagine ourselves to be.
Monica Vitti
3. Love for a Blonde: Down to Ride for Kim Morgan
I was sitting in this film critical studies class today – “The Origins of Cool” – when my esteemed professor, Dr. Todd Boyd, the original Notorious P.H.D., made an interesting point about the difference between the film industry and the music industry. He put forth the idea that music is a more immediate art form, not easier to make but faster, and therefore music is often used as a kind of barometer of culture. That is, music reflects culture in real time more accurately than film does.
If a film goes the traditional production route – through a studio – it will take a year to move from original conception to final edit. If it’s an independent it will take longer. The process is slow, laborious, and collaborative. Film as an art form just isn’t equipped to be topical or even “hip,” necessarily. Which is not to imply that films can’t engage with the culture they come from, but they do it a different way. Keeping up with the cutting edge culturally just isn’t a primary concern of mainstream filmmaking. Keeping up technologically is apparently essential, but culturally it’s just not happening.
Unsurprisingly, mainstream film criticism follows its example. In my last post, I expressed a little disappointment at the apparent lack of personal film blogs with personality, which was admittedly a hasty conclusion that arose out of a deadline. I’m still digging for more and there don’t seem to be a lot, but as I follow the links I find some gems.
One of those is called
Sunset Gun, which features the writing of Kim Morgan and bears the description “kim morgan movies music melodrama.” This is promising, I thought. She likes things other than movies.
Turns out Kim’s got a hand in a lot of different things: she runs the MSN daily film blog The Hitlist, yet apparently still finds internet time to run her own personal blog, which links to a number of other Sunset Run-related sites (a Tumblr, Flickr, and YouTube channel). And then I saw that Kim’s favorite car movie is Monte Hellman’s
Two-Lane Blacktop, a personal favorite that has a place in the Existentialist Cinema Hall of Fame. I knew I’d found my blogger.
Kim’s approach to writing changes depending on the topic she’s writing about. Which makes sense. She does write reviews for a living and they tend to stick to that formula I keep complaining about. But then on Sunset Gun it seems like Kim’s able to get a little more informal and a little more personal. In particular, I enjoyed her piece called
“Siren and Sunset: Leave Her to Heaven,” which begins with a personal anecdote about an unhealthy obsession:
A few years back, I went through an odd, perhaps disturbing personal film festival during which I would watch a double feature of John M. Stahl's masterpiece Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and King Vidor's underrated Beyond the Forest (1949) over and over again. The only person who knew just how many times I'd stayed up, riddled with insomnia, soaking in the heart-stoppingly gorgeousness of the deranged Ellen Berent Harland and the harsh "what a dump" beauty of scheming Rosa Moline was my sister, who got it -- at first. Two movies about unhappy, deeply disturbed women who go to murderous lengths for privacy and very seriously reject pro-creation? Well, yes indeed, that's a perfect double bill.
This is Kim’s opening paragraph and it immediately tells us a good deal about who she is and how she wishes to present herself. She’s not afraid of coming off as a little crazy, “perhaps disturbing.” She’s the type of cinephile capable of re-watching a 1940s double feature over and over again. For a film-lover like me, this gives her cred.
Then there’s that sentence: “Two movies…pro-creation?” Phrased as rhetorical, the question ends up translating to something like “Dark feminist movies with anti-creationist agendas are totally my thing.” A sentence like that will tell you a lot about a person in terms of taste, political beliefs, and social preoccupation (in this case, Kim’s interest in feminism).
The article gets humorous (her sister suspects her obsession means she’s secretly pregnant) and then deep. Years later, Kim discusses her old obsession with a like-minded friend (“Farran Smith Nehme, she of the remarkable
Self Styled Siren”) and finds to her relief that she’s not alone in sympathizing with the “murderous” women she kept getting drawn back to in the movies:
I said of Ellen, "I kind of sympathize with her." Sayeth the Siren: “So do I, so do I.”
Which illustrates another important point about Kim’s blog “voice.” She’s talking about feminism, privacy, 1940s cinema, and the issue of sympathy, all of which typically beg for an academic or “objective” voice. Thankfully, Kim writes it like a human being, one with her own “perhaps disturbing” obsessions and concerns. This is what makes for engaging analysis, in my opinion.
Her recent post on Sunset Gun called
“Insecticide: Revisiting the Genius of Bug” finds Kim bringing up
Bug, a mostly-unseen festival film that played briefly back in 2007, and discussing mostly it in terms of the actors’ brilliance. Of star Ashley Judd, who, I suppose, hasn’t received a lot of attention for her recent acting work, Kim says
Judd … when given the chance, can be one of the bravest and most electrifying actresses working. Moving from a quiet, seen-it-all cynicism to a deranged, focused conspiratorial rambling, her transformation is without question. In her earlier moments, you can see that spark of insanity so, when it blooms to full flower, you truly believe she’s exiting the smothering cocoon of her life.
Here we see Kim getting closer to the role of traditional film critic, analyzing a single element of the film and using it to champion an artist who deserves the recognition. But the seed of Kim’s feminism, her respect for Judd’s portrayal of a powerless woman going to extreme measures to create a little bit of self-worth:
She’s found her purpose. She's also attempting to reconcile her damaged past and neglect in one of the most destructive, insane ways possible. But in Judd's hands, she’s so good, so real, so with her character (my God, just the way Judd sits on a couch is remarkably natural) she becomes, in a tragic, twisted way, inspirational.
This is not the typical caption review for
Bug. Most people don’t dig deep enough to reach a conclusion as thought-provoking as finding inspiration in insanity. And Kim does it with style.
In comparison, here’s a piece from Don R. Lewis’ review in Film Threat, which Metacritic deems helpful enough to be one of its three reviews on its unexpanded page on
Bug:
It's a tough one to recommend to everyone. Just know now this isn't a horror film as they're making it out to be nor is it a true return to form for Friedkin. Even so, it's worth seeing but perhaps as a DVD rental further down the road.
This is exactly the kind of review that is bad for us. A review can be a recommendation to see or not see a movie, but it shouldn’t always be and definitely doesn’t have to be. I’ve seen the films, I’ve read the recommendations. What I’m looking for is engagement. I think Kim Morgan engages. I think I kind of like her.
