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In the Dark (2019)
Superb picaresque novel of a TV show
I'd never heard of this and saw it was on Netflix and watched the first episode, liked the characters and kept going. (The fact Murphy's best friend named Tyson -- a variation on my own name -- is missing, is what held me long enough to keep watching.) I found enjoying the entire series amazing and refreshing. Never seen a character like Murphy before, and the image of the young blind woman and her dog (played by two different dogs, apparently) held me every minute. Every single character betrays Murphy at some point, even her best friend and her adopted mom. It doesn't stop her from going on. The lack of a big budget only hurt the show a little -- Chicago PD as four or five people in empty rooms was weird, but the show gets prisons interiors and great night exteriors. The story never flags. I see all these reviews from people acting as though Murphy's life and flaws were personally offensive to them, which is sad. It's fiction, folks, and you're supposed to learn how other people live -- reviewers here seem to have no empathy. I held off from watching the final episode because I was savoring it. And at the end of the last episode, Murphy does something so utterly shocking that again, I've not seen stories like this told this well. I like the realities presented. But the ending totally startled me (of course I'm not going to spoil it) and made me appreciate the show even more. I'm glad it ended where it did, but the show could easily have gone on another season if they'd wanted. In the Dark seasons 1 through 4 reminds me a classic picaresque novel brought up to date. She truly is rough and appealing. Love Murphy and Pretzel.
Kate (2021)
Why the obsession with assassins?
I saw this film was popular and I love films set in Japan. I like the cast. Then I read that this is just another effing violence fantasy about a bad ass assassin. About the five millionth version too. I'm almost 70 and I've never met a paid assassin. They only exist in action movies and I'm sick of that story. So I've chosen not to watch this. Maybe I'll change my mind. (The reviews here aren't making me change my mind.)
The Dead Don't Die (2019)
Truly terrible movie
The movie just exists so this group of actors and musicians got to pay each other to hang out and party. Tedious and not at all funny. No story, no build, no climax. Glad I didn't pay to see this.
Designated Survivor (2016)
Still watchable
I just want to step in to congratulate the Designated Survivor team, and Netflix, for keeping this show going. The adult language and sexuality very much fit this story and how it's told. The best thing is that it's a political drama with no Trump! It's nice to imagine a world without that Orange idiot. I hope the show does another season. I'll be watching.
La région centrale (1971)
A truly cinematic experience
It was the early 80s, probably 1981, winter, a Saturday night, La région centrale is being shown at the Anthology space in Soho. I go by myself. Just a few months before, as part of the ReCherChez Studio run by Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech in the East Village, a group of us had rented a 16mm print of Wavelength to study it, and that had been most rewarding. I walked to the space. It was snowing and quite chilly. The Anthology was a small theater with a nice screen. There were maybe a couple dozen people there. I didn't recognize anyone. I do recall a group of young Asian men sitting together. I knew that the film had been shot on a specially constructed machine built to let the camera do a 360 degree pan, and Snow was hidden off programming the arm's movement. The soundtrack consisted of the electronic waves of the programming. So I knew what I was to expect.
The film began. A desolate landscape. Quebec. I am sure I had smoked some cannabis on my way to the theater, and I easily settled in to nothing in particular happening for a long time. I just kept watching. I am sure my mind was going off to all kinds of places as I watched, but I never really lost interest watching it go. After a while the pans began to pick up in speed, and eventually the camera began to spin around in a circle as well. The velocity was not very high at first so there was little disorientation, but you could tell there would be. The only human artifact visible was the occasional sight on the ground of the shadow of the arm holding the camera. Otherwise, nothing was visible but a desolate landscape with no people or buildings or anything in a constantly sweeping pan.
After about an hour I began to squirm a bit in my seat. I knew this was a three hour film, and a couple of audience had already walked out. I lasted another fifteen to twenty minutes before I took a break. I used the bathroom, even stepped outside and smoked a cigarette. I recall it was snowing sort of heavily at that time. Then I stepped back inside, where it was warmer and welcome. I went back inside the theater and sat back down. The camera was zooming around much faster now. In short measures the camera started shooting around so swiftly it was impossible to keep up -- then it stopped and went the other direction! Now we were panning back the other way, and it was growing faster again. Then it changed directions again. It was hurtling madly swinging at the end of a tether, and the camera itself was revolving too. The universe was whirling madly before my eyes. It was astonishing and completely disorienting. In that era I was spending a couple of hours a week simply spinning in a circle, with other friends, at the studio, to focus myself physically and mentally. This film was an embodiment of that spinning.
Time completely stopped for this. So did my mind. Suddenly my thoughts weren't racing, suddenly I was deeply focused.
The movement no the screen slowed down until it was back to the slow spin it had begun with. You could feel the film coming to a stop. The room went black then the house lights came up. The group of us there, some folk had certainly left and not come back, probably less than a dozen of us slowly rising to our feet and looking around at each other. Again, I remember mostly Asian guys -- in fact, it was an all male audience. I had sweat dripping down my face. It was winter and snowing but watching La région centrale made me perspire.
No other experience of mechanical images has ever done to me what La région centrale did. I later went to the NYC premiere of his So Is This film and got to hear Michael Snow speak and got to shake his hand. I enjoyed that film, and I've also seen Back and Forth with an audience, and even went to a screening of Wavelength again in 2000 at the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles. And I can rhapsodize about Wavelength at length, about meanings and all that. But nothing has ever come close to that viewing of La région centrale in Soho in the early 80s as an authentically startling alien experience. Even now, other than describing it, I cannot say why it was so powerful or why that viewing has resonated with me for over 35 years now. Maybe the central region is me?
A History of Violence (2005)
No, it's not a good film
I saw this in the theater the week it opened and deeply disliked it. I didn't dislike it because it was violent or had sex in it, I disliked it because its story was ludicrous and predictable. I have not read the "graphic novel." Well, I just watched it again, hoping that I was simply wrong and it was better than I had originally felt. After all, I do enjoy Viggo and Maria Bello a lot and maybe I was just in a bad mood when I first saw it.
But I had the same problems the second time too. The opening scene simply exists to introduce two very unpleasant characters. They have already killed a couple who run a motel; when one of the bad guys goes back to steal something or other, the couple's daughter appears and she is going to be killed as well. This whole sequence was completely unnecessary to the narrative. These two unpleasant characters could have shown up at Tom's cafe with no introduction and done the same things. So the opening scene has literally nothing to do with the rest of the film other than prepare us for ugliness.
And from then on, once again I was confronted with one cliché scene after another, "I know you're really Joey" "No, you're mistaken I am Tom" etc., leading to two violent bloodbaths. Oh, and Tom's kid can suddenly and miraculously beat up bullies. At the very end Tom goes home and no one can speak at the dinner table. Whoa. Really profound. Reviewers go on about how there is a "sense of menace" throughout the film -- I never felt anything but tedium. The movie held no surprises and goes nowhere that I haven't seen in many films before. Yet that means it is "ironic" and "distanced"? No, the only irony is that films like this used to be B-movies and were considered throwaway trash. Now they open festivals and are considered major works.
Le gai savoir (1969)
one of my favorite Godard films
It has been almost twenty five years since I've seen this -- I saw it a couple times in the early 80s and I've never seen it available on tape or disk -- but I found it to be one of the most enjoyable lesson films from Godard. I though it was beautiful to look at, and quite funny in parts, and easy to follow. It IS extremely didactic -- but as the title says, there is JOY in learning. It's popping up in a Godard festival running at the Hammer Museum in June, on a double bill with Weekend, and I intend to check it out again. If I don't like it this time, I'll write again -- but I remember just totally digging this movie. The other writer here says that he didn't go to a Godard film for ten years he so disliked this -- but in my memory it was so joyous i wanted to see it again and again. hey -- maybe we're both right (or wrong).
Dead Boyz Can't Fly (1992)
strange experience, not such a bad film
I probably shouldn't be writing in about this film, because I'm in it so I should be biased about it. But I'm fairly proud that I appear in this oddball movie because when I finally saw it I really enjoyed it.
Dead Boys was shot under the title Neon Red in Brooklyn and Manhattan in late summer 1988. A friend of mine (Matt Mitler -- you really need to see his movie Cracking Up) had auditioned for it and he called me and told me there was a part I could do in it, so I called for an audition myself. The director's office was in the same Times Square building that Geraldo was doing his then talk show and the elevator had a full-length mirror in it (so Geraldo could check himself out while going to the soundstage). Since I'm not really an actor (at the time I was a playwright and stage director) I didn't even have a head shot with me. I just told the folks that I was recommended to audition. The production staff looked at me funny but I read for the part of the suicidal attorney and they liked me, called me back where I met Howard the director and they videotaped my second reading and cast me. This was a surprise to me but I was glad to do it. At the time I was working as First AD on another low budget production and when I learned Neon Red was still looking for a lead actor to play the Nam vet janitor I recommended David John, who was starring in the other film I was working on. They cast David on my recommendation -- he was a great guy and I really enjoyed working with him.
The shoot was three weeks, extremely low budget. Pay was ridiculous and very non-union -- I got $50 a day! Still I got a great kick out of working on Neon Red. The cast and crew were fun and young and energetic. Brad Friedman, who played Goose the lead psycho, was a terrific and charismatic hardworking actor who had done some stage stuff with Robert Wilson. We were shooting the hostage scenes in the "tallest building in Brooklyn" (as we were told).
I was lucky enough to have my suicide scene be the first sequence shot for the film, so we spent some eight hours shooting it from every angle over and over again. It took forever but we all pretty satisfied when we moved on. But I mostly recall the final day of the shoot in that building -- it was an eighteen hour day because we HAD to finish shooting that day there, we had no more time. So the whole climax had to be shot in that very short time and it was totally rushed and improvised. My character was hanged but the scaffolding that was brought in was too tall for the room we were in and so they suspended a bar and when I dropped I was holding myself by my hands on the bar and they kept a tight closeup of my face. Then they shot my feet dangling and I kicked one of my shoes off -- which wasn't in the script and which got applause from the crew. In that final 18-hour day the only craft service we had was cold pizza! Like I say, LOW budget.
Still when I finally saw Dead Boys Cant Fly in 1995, two years after the film finally was released on video, I expected to see a real piece of crap and instead found a disturbing, unrelenting and mean film with some unsubtle humor and a surprisingly decent ending. I've been in a few other films, but none of them are as interesting as this thing. It's not a bad way to spend 90 minutes, as long as you're not too squeamish.
My name I believe is spelled correctly in the film -- Bennett Theissen -- but in the database and in most references to the film my last name has become Thiessen. So when I found my death scene listed on the Cinemorgue website, along with a photo of me being hanged, it's under "Thiessen." It'd be nice if that was corrected but it doesn't bother me too much.
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2005)
Dire
The people who are praising this film are the real disappointments -- I am hoping at least that Leonard will see some good $$ out of this, as his life savings were embezzled away by a manager a couple of years ago and he's over 70 now. But this film is simply terrible. At the beginning Leonard himself says he is not sentimental about his past, and then for the next hour and a half the film emphasizes all the worst sentimental elements of Leonard's songs. It is so bloody PRECIOUS with its endless close-ups of over emoting singers. Cohen's interview is all done in lo-fi video closeups and I so wanted to see a medium or a long shot of his whole body! I couldn't care less about the comments of the performers, especially those overblown ego boys Edge and Bono. None of the performers in this film have done even one song as good as Leonard's own music and if you are thinking about seeing this and you have any doubts at all, heed them. This would be an acceptable PBS special, maybe, for a one time showing. But I will even hesitate at getting a DVD of this. When the film finally shows Leonard semi-performing "Tower of Song" it's ruined by Bono taking a verse. Even the occasional good performances (Antony, Rufus' first number, Martha's The Traitor) are spoiled by the context of the rest of this turgid blabla. Forget this one, and go buy Leonard's most recent album if you want to pay tribute to him.