OFFSIDE

The entire nation of Iran is transfixed by a World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain. Though forbidden by law to attend the game in person, several devoted female fans attempt a variety of schemes to gain admission. A few of them are caught, and held in a makeshift pen just feet away from a gate to the stadium in which this crucial game is unfolding.


Jahar Panafi's 2006 film is a thriller. It's an incisive examination of Iranian sexual politics (giving voice to both the women who are practically enslaved by them and the men who find themselves frustrated having to enforce them. As powerfully as it exposes the double standards of Iran's laws, the film never lapses into polemic: Panafi's humanism means none of the film's disparate, desperate characters are cast as villains. It's an essential look at the social policies and lives of the citizens of Iran, and, because of how it powerfully shows the power of football to unite people across such artificial lines, it happens to be a great fucking sports movie.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, last year's Palme d'Or winner from the internationally acclaimed filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, seems to be getting released in the States on a slow but steady schedule thanks to the stalwart distributor Strand Releasing. Case in point its San Francisco run - after its screenings today, its last day on the SF Film Society screen, it's moving over to the Presidio where San Francisco good guy Frank Lee is showing it for another week.

So this is one of those times where criticism turns into promotion, 'cause having seen the film your proprietor can only urge my fellow American cinephiles to RUN. RUN to any screening near you and let yourself live in this gorgeous, otherworldly, amazing film.


Weerasethakul has become the poet of the Thai countryside, capturing both the lives of the people who live and work there (or are simply passing through) and the mythology that informs those people's spiritual lives. Uncle Boonmee is spun from a 1983 book in which the title character discussed visions of his past lives experienced during meditation, but the movie expands into Weerasethakul's own life, crafting a fanciful tale that encompasses many of his tropes, including Thai soap operas and mythological creatures. A friend who saw Uncle Boonmee with me noted that all of Weerasethakul's films seem to begin with the same foley: the sound of insects gently but insistently buzzing in the forest, with occasional interruptions from nocturnal human activity. I observed that the film ends, as many of his others, with its characters adrift in the modern world, with canned music and blinking lights abuzz with a similar electricity. Weerasethakul's films are all animated with a lifeforce that carries from the mythologized past and, optimistically, beams even from the gaudiest, most obnoxious present. (He seems as tapped into the Unified Field as David Lynch.)

Weerasethakul continues to spin tales close to his heart in his own unique, quiet language. Minimal gestures - a hand on a shoulder; a fish breaking the surface of a water - land with volumes of emotion. The natural world comes to life in colors that simply don't exist in any other film. Weerasethakul poignantly chose to shoot Uncle Boonmee on film (suggesting that a tale that confronts mortality should be shot on celluloid, a dying medium), but the end result is tumescent with lifeforce, and as hypnotized as one becomes watching it one can't help but feel uplifted by its spirit and warmth.



The film is the culmination of a years-long project centering on the town of Nabua near the Laotian border. Phantoms of Nabua, a short film Weerasethakul shot earlier as part of the project, can be viewed here.

LOST HIGHWAY

It was fun to revisit this film at the end of a very busy weekend, which saw your proprietor in Los Angeles for a cleverly conceived, stealthily executed birthday party for a dear, dear friend. During the trip we headed up to Hollywood and stopped by the three houses owned by David Lynch, one of which served as a set for his mid-90s noir psychodrama Lost Highway. About 24 hours later we were back in San Francisco, entering the house, and the fractured mind of deeply troubled saxophonist Fred Madison, on the Castro's screen.

Having rewatched a number of Lynch's films recently, I found LOST HIGHWAY less compelling than some of the others. We might safely attribute the film's more overtly noir flourishes to the influence of writer Barry Gifford, from the more clearly delineated underworld within which Mr. Eddy lurks to the elusive machinations of Patricia Arquette's alluring femme fatale. But on the whole it's built as instinctively as any of Lynch's other films, and just as dually-obsessed. Just as Fred, in extremis, transforms into the bewildered young Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), so does Fred's wife Renee reappear as Alice, a moll for Mr. Eddy who proceeds to upend Pete's already tenuous existence.


The film is bookended with lovely but frantic shots of a highway's line disappearing under the headlights of a speeding car (and scored beautifully by David Bowie's "I'm Deranged", perhaps marking the film as a vent of pre-millennial angst). But the linearity this suggests is thwarted constantly. Left is right in this section of Lynch's universe, right down to the casting: counterculture icon Henry Rollins appears as a prison guard, and the similarly iconoclastic Gary Busey turns in a lovely miniature of a performance as Pete's quietly concerned and clearly loving father. The music is similarly fractured, from Lynch mainstay Angelo Badalamenti's orchestral malaise to Barry Adamson's hypercharged noir jazz to Trent Reznor's horrordrones. But the biggest sonic imprint is left by Rammstein, whose forthright German vocals and heavyheavy guitars prove a perfect coup de grace for ultimate chaos (Lynch put the songs in after discovering that the crew had been listening to them obsessively during the shoot.) As intuitively conceived and unexplained as they are, Lynch's films always feel smooth and reasoned, but even as the film seems to close the circuit, ending as it began, Fred twitches and shifts, ready to explode and derail. Hurtling us and all our questions into a black, unanswering abyss.


It's entirely possible that my remove from LOST HIGHWAY (and disinclination to put it up with Lynch's best work) is some kind of defense against its unrelenting darkness. But one wonders if Lynch himself was put off by what he unleashed here: after creating his darkest features back-to-back (TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and this), he crafted the genial and G-rated (if still thoroughly Lynchian) THE STRAIGHT STORY for Disney.

THE ANIMATRIX: A DETECTIVE STORY

(What you are about to read is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon, the details of which can be found at post's end. I have made a donation to the Film Noir Foundation, and hope you will do the same - link's at the end.)



When the brothers Wachowski commissioned some of Japan's finest animators to add short films to their ever-expanding Matrix franchise, director Shinichiro Watanabe was an ideal collaborator. Watanabe's landmark anime series Cowboy Bebop quickly found a devout cult audience for its story of planet-hopping bounty hunters, leavening its stylized anime action with a strident musical score and a generous dose of film noir style and fatalism. Watanabe's noir influences move front and center for his tight, nine-minute Matrix prequel, A Detective Story...


A Detective Story's protagonist is Ash, a put-upon private eye to whom we are introduced near the end of "the case to end all cases..."


But first things first: we go to the beginning of the case as Ash fields a client's call in a P.I.'s office straight out of Noir City:



Though fearing another domestic case, Ash finds that his generous client wants him to track down a mysterious computer hacker known as Trinity. Familiar as we are with Matrix lore, we know immediately that Ash is being set up as a pawn to pursue an agent of freedom by a conspiracy larger than he could possibly imagine. But like so many noir heroes before him, Ash takes the money and goes to work, unaware of the bad, bad hand fate has dealt him.

Ash's tools of the trade are both classic...


...and downright avant-garde, including a weirdly high-tech rig with multiple flatscreens and phone tech from some alternate universe's 1930s...


Ash soon finds out that other investigators seeking Trinity have wound up either dead or, in the case of one poor bastard, insane. A visit to the latter man's home does yield a disturbing, if visually striking, clue:


Several online, Lewis Carroll-coded communications later, Ash finds himself on a train to nowhere and, finally, face to face with Trinity:


Ash quickly realizes that there's much, much more to Trinity than he could have imagined. Just as, in The Matrix, Keanu Reeves' Neo was awakened to the world underneath his perceived reality, Ash finds the world he knew slipping from his grasp, and having made the trip through the looking glass finds himself in the grip of a reality that is simply beyond his comprehension. Ash is forced to make a crucial decision when several of their fellow passengers turn into Agents that move to eliminate them both.



As the agents draw nearer, Ash feels himself being physically transformed into one of them. Trinity must defend herself, and thus executes the function of femmes fatale from across the years.


Like other noir heroes before him, Ash seems to find a kind of comfort in the shadow of death's oncoming embrace, though he remains bewildered by his too-short life beyond the looking glass.


And Watanabe again engages our familiarity with the Matrix's overall story to give Ash what many noir creators refused their heroes, a simple moment of grace as Trinity confides in him her highest compliment: "For what it's worth, I think you could have handled the truth."


And so Trinity leaves, and even as the agents encroach on Ash, Watanabe's streak of generosity leaves him a final burst of energy to buy Trinity some time, to look death in the eye, and to enjoy one last cigarette.



Lights out.

Watanabe's most distinctive gift is his talent for combining disparate genres and cultures into bizarre but effective hybrids. That he would reach across decades to bring the high-tech, colorful, and action packed world of The Matrix into the lower tech, black-and-white, and somber world of film noir in A Detective Story only seems perverse in retrospect. In fully embracing the noir aesthetic Watanabe has crafted a lovely Matrix miniature, both a fine self-contained prelude to that sprawling (some would argue over-extended) franchise and a dark little gem in its own right. Pleasingly mind-bending, and simply noir as hell.


For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon is hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren. You can go here to read more about the Film Noir Foundation, here to read a cogent interview with FNF head Eddie Muller about its preservation projects and why they matter, and you can go here to make a donation.)

on Buzz

The formula seems pretty steady: there's going to be a big show. A horde of hopeful performers line up to audition, sometimes cruelly judged, each one holding out hope for a big break. Pressures mount backstage, with creators trying to stay focused and producers scrambling frantically for cash. The conflict escalates right into opening night. The show everyone's been waiting for finally starts, and, fueled by the frantic energies of the hour that preceded it, takes on a life of its own, exploding into an organism that grows beyond the boundaries of the stage, of the screen, of reality itself.






Choreographer/director Busby Berkeley is best known for the spectacular dance numbers conceived for several Depression-era Hollywood musicals. Though he was quick to deny any high art intentions, Berkeley's numbers remain some of the most mind-bending and surreal sequences ever created for Hollywood's blockbuster entertainments. His kaleidoscopic choreographies of an impossible number of dancers are so intricate and expansive that one almost expects to come to the end of a tunnel of chorus girls' legs to see the Starchild staring back.


Toward the beginning of Dames, recently screened at the Castro Theatre (the final in a four film BB series), noticing themes of choreographed group labor, mechanized sexuality, and class tension, I mused to my companion that Berkeley and cohorts seemed to be remaking/sequelizing Fritz Lang's Metropolis with each film. (Five seconds after I said this a bodyguard played by Arthur Vinton, a dead ringer for The Tall Man from Lang's film, appeared on screen.) But Berkeley's the only creator involved in these films that works to match Lang in scope and vision. One can't discount the work of the directors and creative teams on these films, but they're all best known for Berkeley's sequences, which absorb even a powerhouse, name talent like James Cagney into their design. In Footlight Parade, Cagney moves heaven and earth to stage his latest spectacle, but in the end he falls down a staircase and winds up accidentally cast in his own number. Just like the audience he's carried headlong into the mind and worlds of Busby Berkeley. And just like us, he gives in completely.

all my love

RECORDED LIVE

Way back during the dawn of cable, HBO ran short films between features to fill the hour. One of my favorites was this, which I'm pleasantly surprised to find was a student film made by TREMORS scenarist S.S. Wilson.