Diaz.

I've long maintained that Joel Shepard, the film/video programmer at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is a national treasure, bringing to his 90-odd seat room the kind of remarkable and diverse film/video program that I wish every town in America could have. I would say this even if we had not been colleagues at one point - though I haven't worked at YBCA in years, Joel's film program keeps me coming back, despite the exciting, and sometimes quite charged, differences of opinion that occasionally emerge between us.

Joel is currently on a tour that includes stops at Rotterdam and the Philippines. He's excited about the work that he's planning on showing at YBCA in the coming months, and so am I. BUT: one work he's excited about possibly bringing is Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, a five-hour opus by Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz.

There are times when the differences between Joel's perceptions and mine are somewhat painful, and this is one of those times. Here's what I wrote after seeing Evolution of a Filipino Family, a ten-hour film widely regarded as Diaz' masterpiece.

"Some things to remember if you're making a TEN AND A HALF HOUR MOVIE -

--Cinematic conventions are your friend. Especially when you're making a movie this long. Making repeated statements that you hate conventional stories within your movie (by, say, interrupting stories coming from radios, or even the mouths of your most likeable characters ever chance you get) is a great way to alienate your audience.

--No matter how long your movie is, something needs to happen in every scene. It doesn't have to be splashy, it can be quite sedate, but something needs to be happening. If your audience is willing to engage your day-long opus, you need to give them enough to keep them anchored and interested. You should avoid shots of roads, and watching people walk down them for three minutes. And you should avoid having a long chain of such shots with nothing else happening.

--If your audience is going to have any kind of empathy for the painful death of one of your characters, you need to make sure that you've given the audience enough reason to care about the character. Particularly if the character's death scene is at least fifteen minutes of him stumbling down an endless street, bleeding.



--"Slow motion shot of a river flowing. A big log falls from the sky and splashes in the water. A voice says "I'm falling." The river flows. A couple minutes later, another log falls from the sky and splashes in the water. A voice says "I'm floating." The river flows. A couple minutes later, another log falls from the sky and splashes in the water. A voice says, "I'm falling." " Do not put a scene like this in your movie.

"Lav Diaz's 630-minute film EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY has some amazing stuff in it, including a strong and surreal portrait of life under the Marcos regime (and a harrowing look at the violence after), a palpable fear that the horrible stories being played out in the film have befallen thousands in the Philippines (thousands of children-turned-murderers, thousands of old women dying surrounded by photographs of departed loved ones, thousands of sisters waiting forever for missing brothers), and a hell-bent determination to portray reality in its rawest form.

"Alas, such rawness manifests in a Dogmaesque B+W video style, with very little to distinguish the story's present from its various flashbacks. Diaz eschews camera filters with an aim towards portraying brutal, unfettered reality, but it winds up bleaching out his images at the exact points they need to resonate. Actors are forced to do absolutely nothing for long, long stretches of time.

"There are enough instances throughout where Diaz keeps his scenes brief and to-the-point, where he does pay attention to cinematic convention, and these scenes are a joy. None of the problems with the film can be blamed on the cast, all of whom are completely natural. The eleven years over which this film was made are evident in the final product - this thing was given plenty of room to grow, and seeing the actors age before your very eyes on screen does lend the whole project a certain (though by no means unique) gravitas.

"But it is frustrating that Diaz is too often willing to subordinate his cast's performances, his own fine filmmaking, and the history of his country to a style that doesn't serve it. Particularly when the film is this fucking long."

I've never felt so at odds with a movie that so many have felt is a masterpiece (and not even a movie universally derided as terrible has left me gibbering and screaming outside the venue afterward, as this film left me). Praise for this film became a sign of a critic I couldn't trust. I'm amused, and not surprised, that even a Rotterdam Film Festival programmer admits to being put to sleep by Diaz' work.

And yet...

I can't help but be curious about Florentina Hubaldo, CTE. It seems that at least some of my issues from my previous encounter are lifted, with Diaz shooting on HD instead of whatever B&W shit EVOLUTION was shot on. Plus FHCTE is half as long as EVOLUTION, clocking in at a mealy five hours. Joel's painful earnestness in describing it would be enough to make me check something out, and even though a ten-hour ordeal can be hard to forget, enough years have passed to dim the memories of that fraught, painful screening. Plus my words remind me that there were many worthy things in the film - perhaps a half-as-long film won't bury such things under so much indulgence.

Diaz' supporters agree that they demand much of the viewer - we're at odds on whether what the viewer gets in return for the time investment is worth it. Perhaps FHCTE will change my mind. We'll see.

SEPARATE LIES

(Many of my online friends were posting about the season premiere of DOWNTON ABBEY with an online fervor usually only seen on Super Bowl Sunday. I haven't had the pleasure of ever seeing the series, though I hope to rectify that one day, since I've enjoyed other work by DA creator Julian Fellowes in the past. Many saw GOSFORD PARK, but few, I suspect, took in his film SEPARATE LIES, about which I wrote the following clumsy but heartfelt appraisal over six years ago.)

Beautifully realized domestic drama/whodunit by Julian Fellowes (writer of GOSFORD PARK). Quiet and intimate, with Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson delivering powerhouse performances as completely ordinary people. A pair of performances with absolute clarity and honesty - we totally understand why these people can't stay married, and why, despite some flagrant infidelity, they can't hate one another, either. Wilkinson and Watson lay their souls bare with a minimum of histrionics.

The film could never have been made in America. Not without our heroes shouting at each other or sweaty love scenes between our heroes and their flings. We just don't appreciate acting that isn't showy.

Anyway, Fellowes is great with details and dialogue - if there was a director born to give us a perfect film adaptation of a Pinter play, it is Fellowes.

2012 afterword: My good friend Aaron Luk, when talking about this film post-screening, gently observed "There are no small problems." Which neatly encapsulates the gentleness and the urgency of this film in addition to so much else beyond cinema. I'm pleased that the film elicited such a strong, sage response, an aphorism that has continued to reverberate over the ensuing years. This, among other things, is what the movies are for.

a murder of crows

Two years ago your proprietor wrote the following:

"On the spur of the moment, after videotaping two shows at the Dark Room I grabbed a cab up to the Clay Theatre, where they were screening Alex Proyas' The Crow at midnight. This film was a staple of a short but memorable time in my life - I saw it four times when it screened back in 1994. A friend visiting briefly during an overseas gig was surprised that the thing had been released, in light of star Brandon Lee's on-set death (mirroring that of his father, Bruce Lee). As powerful as the film was, with its star's death paralleling that of his character, opinion was split of this curious film, among critics and among our friends: Sean thought it was a waste of time; Josh though it was too, unrelentingly dark; a woman I know had an orgasm during the nightclub shootout.

"As for me, I cried every time I saw it - the very act of watching the film was magic, its star a ghost haunting his final film, brought back to life every time the thing unfurled, projected on a screen. Those screenings remain precious memories, and solidified (though I was too young to realize it at the time) my belief in the cinema as an act of worship, as a tribal magic.

"And now fourteen years later, I returned to watch the ghost animate one more time (I could never watch the film on video). Tonight's service had maybe twenty attendees - even a pre-screening performance by a punk cabaret ensemble wasn't an inducement (hell, maybe the audience knew something about the band that I didn't, and went the following night).

"The film has dated all right, I'd say - Proyas' mise-en-scene is still remarkable, as artificial and lovely in its own dark way as the scratchy art and fragmented script of James O'Barr, creator of the original graphic novel. The songs and soundtrack still moved and amazed. The film's weaknesses, to which even as rapturous a convert as I back in '94 wasn't blind, still remained, and have not been made any less clunky by the passage of time. The whole "destroy-the-crow-and-you-destroy-the-man" thing remains an unhappy means of developing third act tension, despite the fact that Eric Draven, as invulnerable as he is, has already had everything taken from him, and could not possibly be more destroyed. The film's good points and bad points were remembered, and taken in with my older, more discerning eyes and more detached heart.

"But when the crow takes flight, propelling Eric toward the first fight in his quest for vengeance, Trent Reznor's cover of "Dead Souls" (itself haunted by original singer Ian Curtis) taking all of us over this damned city, carrying us along the rooftops as Brandon/Eric leap, stride, and run across them, the ghost lives again. I breathe in, softly, and cry."



The thing was wide open for sequels - any number of dead souls could be brought back for vengeance, and sequels proliferated across the screen, yes, but also in comics and novels. The cinematic franchise immediately saw diminishing returns: Vincent Pérez was just dandy in the lead (and much of the supporting cast were more than game), but the screenplay seized on and amplified the "destroy-the-crow-and-you-destroy-the-man" and collapsed into a mess. Further sequels went straight-to-video, and many of them had their moments. But none of the subsequent films could come near to capturing the ethereality of the first: the thing's too charged with the ghost of its star, rendering any sequel a pale, too-solid imitation.

Maybe for that reason I'm having a hard time getting worked up over the news that Mark Wahlberg is rumored to be cast as Eric Draven in a forthcoming remake/reboot. Perhaps I'm just numb to Hollywood disintering yet another franchise in lieu of paying a screenwriter to come up with something new. Perhaps because the original film is too close to my heart, too fast, too ghostly, too keenly felt, to be anything but unassailable.

HANGOVER SQUARE

George Harvey Bone is a composer whose work is obsessing me this week, mostly through his "Nocturnes 1-3" for piano and clarinet. The mood of the pieces is strikingly dark, but there's a certain amount of romantic yearning in them. These are mostly expressed through the clarinet parts in 1 and 2 (which dance almost along the surface of the skittish and somber foundations laid by the piano), but in 3 something in the piece seems to break free - one would almost call it hopeful.

I'm distressed by what I've read about Bone - the man was apparently given to blackouts, during which he would commit acts of murder. There's something in his music that does suggest this, moments where the notes seem to jump out of the framework to the point that they sound almost improvised (but further listening reveals that the work is very tightly structured - his work calls to mind some of Bernard Herrmann's soundtracks, particularly those with jazz elements such as TAXI DRIVER). His work seems to be eclipsed by his notoriety, and there's a certain amount of derision that seems to be leveled at Bone, at those who would perform his work, and even those who would give it ears.

But there's something genuinely soulful, almost optimistic at the heart of his work. Interestingly, some suggest that the few popular songs he wrote at the end of his career speak to something larger, giving his romantic side a full airing only hinted at in his more "serious" work - there's some division in the small, passionate cult that surrounds his work as to whether or not these songs can be considered part of his canon.

I'm intrigued by what I've read about Bone's "Concerto Macabre" - clearly its sole performance was a spectacular event, culminating as it did in Bone's death. His detractors hold this up as further evidence of what has been called his "loopiness", an over-the-top manifestation of a humorously unhinged mind. But as lost in his music as I've become these last few days, the notion of this makes me strangely sad, the idea of this brilliant but hopelessly fucked up man, giving his life to give expression to the only thing that made sense in his world. The "Concerto Macabre" was lost along with Bone, and today remains, like its creator, a ghost lost in murder and time.

Though today's audience tends to laugh when (and if) confronted with Bone and his work, I only see a kindred spirit, a tragic figure doomed in spite of his genius. I like to presume that he was able to find some satisfaction in finally realizing his masterwork in his final moments, that it took him to a place beyond pain. But Bone's romanticism is only out of our reach if we will it to be so.

(A more straight-up review of John Brahm's Hangover Square, by one of my favorite bloggers, Arbogast on Film, can be found here.)

REVENGE OF THE CHEERLEADERS

A Tarantino favorite, this film chronicles the efforts of a cheerleading squad to thwart the plot of a real estate combine to tear down their high school. Sounds innocent enough, but this thing's the sequel to The Cheerleaders, itself a remarkable T+A sojourn by experimental filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Richard Lerner. And Dorsky and Lerner pack the thing with plotless, out-of-nowhere moments that go beyond abstraction and realize the whole thing with a wildly contagious enthusiasm.

There are a number of professional actors in the thing (though only one of them went on to bigger things), but they're given little direction in terms of building credible characters. But credibility is the last thing Dorsky and Lerner are going for: none of the kids have parents, Aloha High School is a veritable Xanadu of joyous sex and debauchery, and a golf course's sand trap leads directly to the main office of the villainous developers' lair (the labyrinthine final reel shares Kubrick's sense of architecture).

The thing feels...well, like a horny high schooler's sex fantasy, moreso than any movie I think I've ever seen. A teenage daydream, with abundant free association: ineffectual authority figures are easily subverted (including one old lady from the school board who wipes out gorgeously on a textbook left in the hall); a food fight that turns directly into a soap-bubble orgy in the gym showers; students breaking out repeatedly in barely choreographed but exuberant dance numbers brimming with real joy. The amateur but ready for anything cast includes a young David Hasselhoff, whose performance as Boner perfectly exemplifies the dim-witted horniness and antic joy of the movie as a whole (and who appeared in this film to get his SAG card). But everyone in the cast is a little more charming than they need to be, and are all of a piece with the tone of the film.

It would be too easy to view this through a veil of irony and dismiss its apparent shortcomings. Engaging this thing on its own terms yields insane rewards, and a real joy that "better" movies are too programmed, too safe, too unspontaneous to capture. I wish all dumb teen movies were half this smart.

(An archival review from three years ago. Fresh content imminent.)