GEORGE WASHINGTON David Gordon Green, U.S.A., 2000
“A Terrence Malick rethink of Gummo “? That’s how one reviewer celebrated the curious first feature of 24-year-old David Gordon Green, a Texas-born independent, when it premiered at Berlin — a grim reminder of how closely critics can resemble both publicists and aspiring filmmakers pitching their projects to producers. If we assume that the audience is so jaded it merely wants to mix and match what it already knows, then it’s a logical (if unflattering) label for something new. Or if one’s simply stymied by the challenge of describing a fresh sensibility, some familiar points of comparison are perhaps inevitable. (For me, it would be Thomas Pynchon’s plaintive boys’ tale, “The Secret Integration”, despite some telling differences in class and regional setting.) But the fact is, whatever Green’s misjudgments — starting with the movie’s misleading title and ending with a kid’s cutesy/ unlikely list of favorite heroes for an offscreen shrink — the writer-director should mainly be credited with making nobody’s mistakes but his own.
One can see the sort of thing that prompted the wisecrack: Malick’s poetic Americana and adolescent female narrators, Gummo as a Southern working-class geek festival featuring the wanton murder of pets.Read more
With Beat Takeshi (Kitano), Yusuke Sekiguchi, Kayoko Kishimoto, Yuko Daike, and Kazuko Yoshiyuiki.
I’m finally starting to understand Takeshi Kitano’s movies, though given that his specialty seems to be a mixture of violence, slapstick, and sentimentality, I’m not sure I’ll ever be a convert. Still, I found Kikujiro (1999) — his eighth feature, showing this week at the Music Box — much more affecting than the other three features I’ve seen.
One of the fascinating things about Kikujiro, which has virtually no violence, is that it seems both more mainstream and more experimental in form than the other Kitano movies I’ve seen. It changes style so often that it all but eliminates narrative. It’s divided into sections like a photo album, with photos and captions doubling as chapter headings. It has intricately choreographed expressionist dream sequences, extended gags in extreme long shot that all but convert the main characters into balls ricocheting through pinball machines, and absurd physical gags in medium shot (e.g., the hero tries to swim) that take the form of frozen tableaux and provoke blank stares from other characters. Read more
The title of this 64-minute video by Guy Maddin (Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary) refers to its having been commissioned as a gallery installation for the Rotterdam film festival, to be watched through a succession of arcade-style peep-show machines. Screening here as a self-contained work, it seems like Maddin’s most personal project yet: the hero is a hockey player named Guy Maddin; his mother, like Maddin’s, runs a beauty salon; and Maddin even casts some of his own family members. But the overall feel is phantasmagoric–pitched, like most of Maddin’s work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie. Also on the program are Maddin’s justly celebrated six-minute short The Heart ofthe World (2000), showing in 35-millimeter, and his five-minute Odilon Redon, or the Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity (1995). Gene Siskel Film Center.
Having taken his formalist bent to extremes in The Circle (2000), Jafar Panahi switches to lumpy neorealism with minimal loss of force. The script by Abbas Kiarostami (who also wrote Panahi’s 2000 The White Balloon) was inspired by a news story about a pizza deliveryman in Tehran who shot a jeweler and then himself in the course of a robbery attempt. Panahi cast a real pizza deliveryman, Hussein Emadeddin, as the robber, only to discover that his overweight, middle-aged lead was a paranoid schizophrenic, which may account in part for his deadpan, oddly commanding presence. The film’s candid treatment of the class resentments brewing in contemporary Tehran have made the film unshowable in Iran, where the government has branded Panahi an American agent — a painful irony given that he couldn’t even enter this country if he wanted to without an inordinate amount of red tape and humiliation. In Farsi with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
