Film & The Future of Narrative Soul: Thoughts

I was thinking about the connections between Hanna:

and the semi-recent film, Never Let Me Go:

There is something immensely creepy about scientifically engineered humans -- soulful, expendable, throwaway people (and this is a theme in both Never Let Me Go & Hanna).  It made me wonder about nature versus nurture when nature is so heavily nurtured.  There was a really interesting article in Discover about nature and nurture in the film, Hanna.  Click here to read "Hanna: A Transhuman Tragedy of Nature vs Nurture."

In this www.high-tech world of "ambient awareness" via Twitter and the imminent Google chip implant, what are the boundaries of the human body, the reaches and worth of a soul?  We're scientifically engineering our own memories, digitally enhancing, click-and-dragging our emotions into compartmentalized albums on Facebook.  Does new technology give us longer lives, or lesser appreciation for the lives we create? In terms of reality extending beyond the narrative of our lives -- on blogs and Facebook walls -- and becoming stretched and indestructible like a science fiction-esque cloudless sky of singular consciousness, I think of Zadie Smith's incredible essay, "Generation Why."  Click here to read the whole article.  How does the timelessness of a cyber-sky affect the crafting of our personal design, avatar personas, online presences, and beautifully fragmented-and-integrated, constantly moving-and-improving personal narratives?

When we undulate involuntarily along a 'feed, moving like breath, rhythmic and typing, editing has become synonymous with existing.

Check out this amazing short film about the 'Today' project by Jonathan Harris.  Harris creates and maintains a permanent string of images as a narrative life memory by taking a picture every day (it's like stop-motion soul-scribing):

This reminded me of something I listened to a while back on This American Life called 'Plan B.' The story near the end of the program reveals the rather mundane and somehow surprising and heartbreaking fate of inanimate objects.  Click here to listen to the program.

Everything leaves traces behind.  Everything has a narrative reality.  But how permanent can a narrative become in terms of the traces it leaves behind?  In the film Never Let Me Go, Kathy stands on a hilltop where lost things vanish.  The feeling of that scene made me think of the fate of people as 'things' in science fiction and how modern science is transforming the fate of the narrative into cyber-sci-fi (even transforming within the narrative to extend beyond the boundaries of the narrative -- soul and memory dissipating in an easily accessible and expansive digital sky).  In the story of our lives, humans trickle down a hill, fall to pieces and disappear into a Milky Way river of lost objects, live-streaming over the narrative horizon.  We are carried away in the afternoon breeze.  Gone?

Digital imprints are impressive.  Nothing is ever lost or permanently erased on the Internet.  We can shape beautiful designs and memories in the pixilated sand, untouched by the wind.

... just a passing thought :)

Fire and Rain

You may have completely forgotten about Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty, starring a then 16-year old River Phoenix.  It's a beautiful film.

If you've been honoring the dearly departed director with 12 Angry Men, Network and Dog Day Afternoon on a loop & you're looking for another Lumet masterpiece, definitely check this one out:

That scene still makes me cry.

The Cherokee: An Emerald City Wheezes

T

Click here to read my essay in the 12th Street Journal: 

An Emerald City Wheezes: A NYC Walking Tour of the Cherokee Apt. Building on 78th & York

Click here for my LoveCinema 'Digirazzi Report' posts.  

Click here to check out my post on the Top 10 Blog: Top 10 Dream Films: Reality?! Never!

"Steph: The Movie"

Poster by Rick Slusher (@TheSlush)

Music Box Hanna

After a phenomenal brunch at Good Enough to Eat on the Upper West Side, we headed to the Lincoln Square Theater (a truly Disney-fied wonder.. they can bury me there) to see the film Hanna.  My thoughts on the film:

Open the music box.  Inside, the ballerina is lethal.  She whirls to unheard music, feels nothing, just misses the heart.  Once upon a time, a girl with icy white eyebrows emerged from her enchanted house in the woods.  The rest is written in a fairy tale – the Grimm kind.

Hanna is extraordinary.  It was directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, The Soloist).  I won't give away too much here because I like the idea of diving into this film and getting swept away.  It's an adrenaline flick, the kind of movie that catapults you out of your awareness.  It's a fairy tale that feels exotic, Grimm.    

The film focuses on a mysterious and icy cool young girl named Hanna (the ridiculously magical Saoirse Ronan) living and training with her father (a bearded and bedraggled Eric Bana) in the middle of nowhere.  Seriously, young Hanna guts a deer in the first 5 minutes of the film and you know she means business.  Hanna has no expression, no fear.  Her eyes radiate from a mummy mess of animal furs.  It's as if she was somehow formed in a world of ice.  She has luminous blue eyes -- an unrelenting and guiding force of the soul -- and a face that has been chipped away to reveal an ice-picked princess, a ghost.  She's a weapon: sheer, sharp, deadly cool and more like the coil that spins the music box than the ballerina trapped inside, endlessly spinning (imagine the vapid expression of a carved face-suddenly awakened). The film emerges from the forest at a high speed driven by the thumping heart of The Chemical Brothers score, pushing the narrative forward, cutting and whirring inside a box (a different world), whirling around inside itself.  

Hanna is pursued by a Cate Blanchett (the most stunning Big Bad Wolf in the history of the fairy tale) and that's essentially all I'm going to say about the plot:

A few quick associations:

Hanna reminded me of a Tom Tykwer film.  It had that femme-techno urgency a la Run Lola Run or The Princess and the Warrior (and Soairse Ronan's ravishingly washed out look is like the flip side of Franka Potente's eery angelic grace):

Also, check out Tykwer's short from the film, Paris Je T'aime (it has Hanna's whirring urgency and emotional tempo): 

Saoirse Ronan is so expressive and so lovely, it's hypnotic to watch her when she's still:

She was nominated for an Oscar for Wright's Atonement at the age of 13:

Wild and wielding a bow and arrow, I can absolutely see why Ronan was considered for the Katniss role in the upcoming film adaptation of the book, The Hunger Games.  And this is an interview with Ronan:

I was considering Ronan as a young Sarah Polley: 

And the deadly father-daughter dynamic reminded me of Kick-Ass:

or The Professional:

or even Paper Moon:

Let's think of Hanna as a world inside the music box.  Experience the film the same way you would the box.  It's not the typical movie that aims directly for the heart.  It appears to miss its target on purpose  It's cyclical.  It opens and shuts.  It begins and ends on the same moment - missing the heart (literally, figuratively).  Some said the film was lacking an emotional core, but I believe the emotion just slipped in at a different place (at a faster pace).  It felt the way music does.  It moved like music.  (Click here to read about the psychology of music.)  Music tells us how to feel.  The film-music's feeling drove us into the coil, pumped us through the techno-beating heart of Hanna.  It's an active barometer, intimate and unreal, seeping into plot and iris.  The music inside transports us, moves us.  And then we shut the box.  The music stops.  After all, what do you find at the heart of a music box?  Cranks and levers, a spinning doll.  Music.  

For the fanatic, here's an additional Hanna reading list - enjoy!

Click here to read: "Hanna: Saoirse Ronan, a Jason Bourne for the Glee generation" from the LA Times.

Click here to read: "Joe Wright and Saoirse Ronan Talk Hanna, Fairytale Violence and Girl Power" from The Finger Dandy.

Click here to read The Rolling Stone review of Hanna.

Click here to read Roger Ebert's Hanna review.

... a few of my favorite things

Yes, for some reason, I think we can find the meaning of life here:

Perhaps we can play with Marlo & dash through the cyberstreets, looking for love:

Or what about a little sunshine?

Summer Lovin'

Soulful, Zooey-ful, and with a dash of Henry Mancini:

For those of you who love music and live for the vicarious celluloid summer fling, check out the beating heart mix tape movie that is (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and 60s ingénue-chic Zooey Deschanel.  It’s a ‘boy meets girl’ montage set strikingly against the Hallmark grain.  (500) Days shuffles the deck, leaving snapshots lost in time, like stars in space, hanging effortlessly in the darkness.  They’re groovy, serene, never truly silent even as they assault your dreams and flash tirelessly beyond the first days of a new love. The boy is pining.  The girl of his dreams breezes through his life with the blue-eyed soul of, well, Zooey Deschanel.  That bitch.  We love her.

For those of you who haven’t seen Deschenel’s classic first-love flick, All The Real Girls, I slap your wrist.  Shame.  It’s a doozy.  Here’s the trailer:

(500) Days is like a sky-lit marquee of light-headed joy. A familiar song brings with it the sharpness and clarity of a painful, perfect memory. Music is a trigger. Perception is distorted, and there is no reason behind the rhythm and the flow.  Fragments fly at the heart.  The soul is weighed down in dancing debris. (500) Days of Summer jumps around in time, zig-zags, brands the mind, lights up.  It’s an ipod shuffle of love.  It flips through tidbits, fractured joy, an essence of a relationship.  Here’s the trailer:

Aaaaaaaand, a great scene from the film:

If you long for the nonlinear approach to love, perhaps you’d enjoy a peek back at the 1967 film, Two For The Road, starring Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn.  The film ricochets around in time, a lot like (500) Days of Summer, only it spans decades with a similar effect: Enchantment and a swift and bittersweet oozing tune to strum the heart (classic score by Henry Mancini).  Here’s the trailer:

If you want the totally irreverent beat without the heartbreak, look back to the old Dennis Potter series, Lipstick On Your Collar.  For a quick pick me up on YouTube, you can ogle the young Ewan McGregor and his blue suede shoes as he attempts to lip-synch his way out of a drab office and dazzle us with his shiny teeth.  Yeah, he’s vampin’ it up, but good.  Check it:

and one more hip swivel for the mix tape:

What can I say?  Love is strange:

 

Just Ask The Song…

Passing Strange finds a larger audience, thanks to Stew, Spike Lee, & IFC

True lovers of cinema have access to “The Real.”  The phenomenal rock musical and Tony Award winning play, Passing Strange has been given new life, access to a wider audience, and a slick new silver screen stage.   Spike Lee’s filmed version of the play is available on DVD and if you haven't seen it yet, it's absolutely unmissable.

A rock musical created by long-time musician, Stew -- an experienced performer and first-time Broadway sensation -- Passing Strange is a wildly moving, boundary-leaping, autobiographical play.  You can read about Stew’s journey here.  To delve deeper into the idea of cultural clichés that fueled the musical’s themes and for more background on Stew, check this article in Psychology Today.

Passing Strange is the story of a rebellious young black artist, traveling in search of art and love, a place, a song, “the real.”  Stew wrote Passing Strange to “work the wound” of his own adolescence, and it was a special experience for the select few who had the opportunity to make it to Broadway or the Public Theater.  Spike Lee recorded a few of the historic performances, including the closing night show, and he pieced together a kinetic piece of electric live theater, smoothed out over celluloid.

Passing Strange, named in part for a passage in Othello referring to the wooing of Desdemona, has several meanings (as does wooing).  Stew spent a lifetime wooing an audience.  He was wooing a shadow of himself in the form of the play’s title character, Youth.  He was passing time -- indescribably strange, unsettling in its rhythm.  Stew was passing through life, memory, cliché, the many masks that a person wears when seeking authenticity of life, of the self.  He was passing through guises, incarnations, the ebbing of the flow, the many dimensionalities of ‘reality.’  A beat passing through the soul feels like this, moves like this.

From his website, Stew recalled in an interview:  “Obviously, the term “passing” has deep historical meaning for any African American my age or older. My grandmother was light enough to pass. But the kid in this play discovers there’s more to passing than just black folks passing for white. The term “passing” also has to do with time passing, of course.” It far transcends skin color.

Stew’s heartbreak simmers behind wise eyes shaded in orange tinted glasses, oozing through rough guitar riffs and the cracked voice of a narrator lost in song.  His show is passing through lapsed time, soaking the scars in painful, strikingly cathartic melody.  To face the past as a direct reaction to the present, you must twist your perception, backbend, bleed as you breathe, shout.  You must “ask the song.”

And now we all have the opportunity to watch Stew dance to his own metronome, and it’s more than “alright.”  It’s transcendent.  Click here to visit the film’s awesome website for more details, and ogle the scenes from the movie.  You can also click here for the New York Times blog with sound byte snippets from Stew and Spike Lee.

Onscreen, the anti-musical sensation Passing Strange stays true to itself, to the source, to Stew.  It swelters in the orange shade of electric guitar, settles into the sunset.  Never fades.

Now is the Time to Revisit “A Completely Cool, Multipurpose Movie”

“What do cars have to do with books, you might ask?”

David Byrne has been a pop icon for quite some time now.  He’s most notably a fabulous musician.  Over the past year, he’s been touring the country to promote the album Everything that Happens will Happen Today, his recent collaboration with Brian Eno.

Think back and you’ll find that Byrne is very much a long-term, multipurpose human, an avant-garde writer, artist and director.  We mustn’t forget about Byrne’s most important contribution to 80s cinema, True Stories.  Check out Byrne on the Celebrity Friends application for more information on the many artistic Byrne projects that have transpired over the years.  You’ll be surprised by his range, his silliness, his genius.. and his oversized suit-wearing capabilities.

And perhaps now is the time to take a look back at the classics.  Vintage Byrne is still vital film entertainment.  The 80s Byrne classic True Stories, dubbed “A Completely Cool, Multipurpose Movie” is as relevant now as it ever was.  You’ll marvel at the music (the time-warp, the familiarity, the awesome karaoke prospects of “Wild Wild Life”).  Queue it up, and feast on the delicious pop fanatic dream world of Virgil, Texas.  Take a tour with Byrne as your guide.  The Talking Heads provide the score.

True Stories was originally released in 1986.  It was written by Byrne, Stephen Tobolowsky, Beth Henley, and directed by Byrne.  Supposedly inspired by grocery store tabloid headlines, the film follows Byrne as he drives through small-town Texas in a big red car, expressionless face shadowed under the rim of a giant cowboy hat.  His voice is monotone, soothing, coolly enamored with the wide expanse of middle American nothingness. He enters Texas like a kid riding a red blur in slow-mo.  His narrative spans the drag for stray thoughts, subtly, slyly illuminated in some marginal reality, similar to ours, but slightly askew and neatly off the cuff.

Byrne takes to the road littered with strip malls, voodoo love shacks, karaoke-infused “wild lives,” evangelistic pop imagery.  A “green” family is outfitted in leaves for a mall fashion show.  The town’s local gossip-gal speaks earnestly about her tail, her alien abductions, and her fling with the real Rambo.  John Goodman is looking for love.  Spalding Gray works magic with a spinning lobster, and a sassy Swoosie Kurtz is fed by robots because she never leaves her bed. This of course, is just the prelude to another Talking Heads song. 

The iconic image of an 80s Byrne in a big suit is strangely representative of the feeling of True Stories.  The landscape is muted, ill-suited to reality, larger-than-life, shrouded in song, magical.  Nowadays, it’s essential that we ask the important questions, and if you’ve ever wondered why you run out of Kleenex, paper towels and toilet paper at the same time and considered a possible nation-wide conspiracy, Byrne may just have the answer.  Or perhaps he just asks the same questions, but he does it in harmony with full choir accompaniment. 

Spelunking for Love In Unlikely Places

From my LoveCinema blog: 

Chill out in a cinematic snow-globe from the Wholphin archives.

With the steamy summer sun beating down, perhaps you’ve already exhausted your options at the air-conditioned multiplexes. If you’d prefer to stay in and navigate the film world via the Web, I suggest you take a look at some back issues of Wholphin, McSweeney’s “DVD Magazine of Unseen Things.” It’s a periodical DVD collection of short films, oddities, and visual snippets. Wholphin is available for purchase on the McSweeney’s website, or you can check out individual short films at your leisure on YouTube).

A particularly cool cinema short from the first issue of Wholphin is available here:

It’s called “The Big Empty,” and it’s not your typical ‘girl meets boy in arctic womb’ story.  Written, directed, and produced by J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Siegel, and adapted from the story “The Specialist” by Alison Smith, “The Big Empty” stars Selma Blair as a girl with an infinite emptiness inside of her.  It’s a feeling that is expressed simply as something that “aches.” 

The film opens from a gynecological perspective, a womb’s eye view.  A lonely girl visits doctor after doctor to cure herself of the “ache” described by some as “the feminine bleeding wound.”  She sits on a stack of books like some lovely melancholy Alice in somber-land, dark eyes blank and searching a moon-lit fairy tale.  She radiates pain and despair from every porcelain pore.  Her indescribable “ache” eventually leads her to a doctor known only as “The Specialist.” 

During a gynecological examination, The Specialist dives inside the girl with a pith helmet and a flashlight to discover a vast and unending arctic nothingness that he sees as his ticket to fame.  He exploits the girl’s “empty” and transforms her into a vision of angst, a star medical anomaly, an Antarctic beauty queen, and a curious media sensation. The girl has other ideas.  She finds a kindred spirit when a boy at a talk show raises his hand to ask her if her “big empty” aches.  Then he bravely dives inside of her to see for himself. 

It’s true that the ‘meet cute’ happens in the most unusual of places, places we’d least expect, in the darkest corners of the body.  But the path is not the point.  The final scene is a beach gone frigid, snowflakes rising over a pixie Blair (it’s a gorgeous little film). When the adventurous boy delves into the deep wound, he becomes lost in an icy and inhospitable place of uncharted vulnerability.  He finds his way to the girl’s heart while trekking the vast fallopian emptiness of the human soul.  It’s a beautiful place to leave footprints.  

Four Eyed Monsters: To Live and Die In Cyberspace, Part 1

Putting up a few of my old posts from the LoveCinema archives... Enjoy!

It all begins the same way:  “I was born… Until one day..”

Long ago, in a screwball world, the movie wooing was easier.  The “hero” met-cute with his “heroine.”  She stole his golf ball.  He slipped on a banana peel.  They ripped each other’s party clothes.  He was fearless when faced with her wild cat. They lived happily in a world of pratfalls and hapless aunts.  Done.  Angst-be-gone. Roll the credits.  Click here for more insight into that world. 

In some cases, the guy just leaves the screen, with nothing more than a dream, a pith helmet, and a free-wheeling (and unscripted) feeling of desire.  If only dating matched multiple viewings of The Purple Rose of Cairo.. 

Love is not so easy nowadays.  We have the internet, paranoia, STDs, the sense of closure before the fact, the opportunity to layer our realities in cyberspace.  We tweet, wink, click to the next photo, save, delete, pause.  The eyes lie.  Expectation can be manipulated, edited out. Modern romance is a constellation of talking heads, a medium-meld, a million immediately distant choices. It’s the click-and-drag easy access “I love you, buts..” I can drag my perception of you over you until it becomes you, like a second skin or a Juicy jumpsuit.

Connection is like a dance, and we capture it on film to prove that it exists.  Me and You and Everyone We Know exist at 24 frames a second -- attract, repel, chase, collide, meld.  Don’t try this at home, kids: 

In film, like life, the act of browsing humans has become second nature.  We can post a picture, put that person in our “cart” and continue shopping.  A world of thought lies cramped in our back pocket.  Every possibility has a different password. Without ever speaking, we connect.

Four Eyed Monsters, a film by Arin Crumley and Susan Buice is also a term used to describe a couple.  A lovey twosome becomes “four-eyes, two mouths, eight limbs that wrap around themselves in narcissistic self admiration.” The story is pulled like a photographic shadow from a real romance, happening in real time, unraveling light reflected between eyes, and projecting it outward.

It takes place in New York.  Crumley is a shy videographer of weddings and Bar mitzvahs.  Buice is an artist waiting tables.  Online dating brings the two together.  Boy courts girl via interactive stalking.  They decide to communicate through artistic mediums, never speaking directly, existing in partial-sketch, scribbling notes back and forth like post-it subtitles, leaving a paper trail of modern love.  Here’s the trailer:

Four Eyed Monsters, like love, is funny and exquisitely ragged. It was a huge hit at film festivals but failed to snag a distributor.  Undeterred, the filmmakers found a way to reach audiences themselves. Crumley and Buice attached Web episode podcasts like a head and tail to the body of the film, extending the storyline.  It morphed into a bigger monster with four-eyes and feelers.  Audiences could watch the episodes and respond to them, demand that the film come to their hometown, become a part of the community, and the experience.  The world could pet the monster.

In Monsters, an art teacher warns his students: “Be careful of the orifice here that you’ve created.” Tripping into one another’s self-actualized orifices is a hazard we cannot avoid.  And now we have the vast cyberspace orifice to fall into like Alice down the loophole (to a wonderland filled with clean and lick-able subway pole fantasies).  Bigger orifices allow for better digital connections (or multiple connections).  And yet, couples rarely look out into the world as one, as two sets of eyes that see the sun set the same way.  They don’t see the sky.  They fix on one another, lovingly, critically, and in this case creatively.  Those four eyes become one monster.  Check out this clip from Hedwig and the Angry Inch about “The Origin of Love”:

Most of the “meld” is just wishful thinking and a collection of shared moments, existing in time like rain or scars or pixels of light making clear the many talking heads of MySpace.  You can bookmark them and revisit them later. 

Check the abstract and click here to read about the psychology behind relationships 2.0.

To “date” is to shop from an assembly line of limbs – eyes and feet and fingers and bottles of dye, body oil and hope.  The ideal romantic “setting sun” postcard image is edited on a loop, running repeatedly on the insides of our eyelids, trickling down our consciousness, reality, soul, spine, screen.  We live in a time when four eyes -- clear as day -- drip with icicles along the iris, screen-lit, wide.  They watch one another and no longer blink.  Watch this trailer from the film, Me and You and Everyone We Know: 

Another film that straddles reality, speaking to issues of love and connection is Henry Jaglom’s Venice/Venice.  Check out the trailer:

And Jaglom talks connection and loneliness with Orson Welles here: 

In the ever-evolving world of the film love story, four eyes multiply and become a million.  New communities replace old loneliness via YouTube.  In this way, Monsters is a monument to love and a testament to change, an undulating creature, suspended in cyberspace.   

Four-Eyed Monsters Episodes 1-8 are now available online.  Episodes 9-13 are available on the DVD after the film.  You can watch the first eight podcasts, buy the DVD, and discuss here. 

You can also follow the film on Twitter.