japh

a simple story that examines human nature. had a hollywood director attempted this, with real sets and props, it would have bombed miserably. trier avoids this through the odd world he’s created. it has the feeling of beckettian stage design, with its minimalist approach. yet the narration and dialogue are very straight forward and lack the pretensions of the avant garde. sort of reminiscent of peter watkins’ la commune. dogville runs straight at the topics of community, trust and love. the film also portrays the impressive human capacity for selfishness and the willingness to manipulate others due to our egocentricity.

grace (nicole kidman) arrives in dogville for reasons that aren’t revealed until the end of the film. what is clear, though, is that she is desperate and willing to do whatever it takes to win the trust of the community. the community, initially skeptical, embraces her due to her hard work and kindness. when the possibility arises that grace may have come to the community to escape something, the people of dogville show their true nature. grace is taken advantage of in all manners, most grotesquely as a sexual rag doll to the men of the town. tom edison (paul bettany) acts as the town philosopher and moral guide, and becomes embroiled in his own struggle over philosophy and the flesh. it is he who falls the farthest.

besides the sparse set, this film is given its unique flavour from john hurt’s narration (couldn’t be more perfect for the film) and the cinematographic trick of the large overhead shots of the whole town.

although theme of community is explored in depth, by the end of the film it is made obvious that dogville is making a point about america as a nation. the closing titles are of harsh photographs of american life (including photos by dorothea lange and jacob holdt) set to david bowie’s “young americans”.

i can’t wait to see the next two films in this trilogy, and hope to catch them in the theatre. until then, i should rewatch trier’s the idiots. i don’t know if i could handle dancer in the dark again - it’s only been a few years and i don’t know if the trauma has passed. element of crime left me cold, although that was many years ago and i can barely remember it. dogville can be recommended without reservation.

i keep finding these files with ramblings in them that i forgot to post. sometimes i run across these things and think why the hell did i even bother wasting my time writing about that?

rather than let them rot on my hard drive i'll post them, naturally, and share my banality with the world. or whomever unwittingly stumbles across them.

whenever you read a ridiculously outdated rambling, it's very possible it is the result of my absentmindedness. or, equally plausible, that i'm ridiculously outdated.

everyone has a strong opinion on this one. friends who lived in japan hated it. other friends who lived in japan loved it. i've never been to japan, sadly, but i thought it was a refreshingly simple hollywood movie that didn't fill my head full of nonsense notions of what japan is like. i assumed all odd comments and visions of japan were supposed to represent the disorientation and social disconnection of our protagonists and not reflect negatively on the japanese.

sophia coppola is an odd creature that doesn't sound very intelligent in interviews yet makes intelligent films. i had a grudge against her when i was young, largely based on that horrible bit of acting she did in the godfather III. however, she's won me over with the virgin suicides and now this. she's made the adorable bill murray even more lovable (is this possible?). scarlett johansson also comes across as cutesy. i found it curious that while the film is asexual they chose to open the film with scarlett in her transluscent underwear. were they suggesting that she is indeed a sexual being but is more than capable of carrying on a fun relationship with an older man? or were they trying to appease the financers who only watched the first fifteen minutes of the film? or am i just cynical?

no matter what you think of any of the above, bill murray is bill murray is bill murray. always watchable. always entertaining.

this movie is complete schlock. but worth watching for johnny depp and his ridiculous t-shirts (he's a covert cia agent that at one point wears a t-shirt with "CIA" on it). alright, that's an awful reason for sitting through a movie. how about salma hayek? or danny trejo?

even more amusing than the absurd movie is the special feature crap that illustrates robert's methods. rodriguez is a hyper personality who is obsessed with the concept of cool. while this is somewhat sad, he is entertaining and energetic. he's a complete technophile, obsessed with the ability for filmmakers to retain a high degree of independence while still producing hollywoodish content. while he certainly can't claim he's making films for under 20k, he's still able to do a lot with far less than his contemporaries. his determination is something to be admired, and his lust for filmmaking is endearing.

huh what? after watching this i felt completely creeped out, regardless of how cheesy the film was. there are certain images that will stick with you for days after you have returned the video to the rental store. the ending is particularly mind-bending.

shion sono's suicide club (jisatsu circle) is a peculiar film about a rash of suicides that occur because of a certain suicide club. the plot of the film is bizarre, and the story development completely unsettling. what i think was so odd was the difference in how japanese and north americans perceive the concept of suicide. in the film suicide is something that occurs when life has no meaning (or when the suicide club is the only meaning that is ascribed to one's life). in north america the idea of suicide is so drenched in christian ethic that it is difficult to watch this film without having a negative moral filter in place. i think the north american audience must have had a hard time with this one.

i would recommend this film simply for the indescribable feeling it leaves you with.

i love the voyeuristic feeling when a filmmaker leaves the camera idly focusing on everyday characters and circumstances. gus van sant does this repeatedly throughout elephant, and these are the most rewarding moments in an otherwise disappointing film.

the problem with this movie is that van sant tried to make a statment about youth violence. i wish he had simply stuck to the style of the opening of the film, letting the camera graze on the everyday problems of typical youth. problems with parents. interest in the opposite sex. instead, the film follow the trajectory of two fucked up kids who go on a violent gun-laden rampage through their high-school.

the stillness and the patience of this film are beautiful. the way the camera follows various characters around their daily routine is intriguing in its banality. it's the life that we've moved past now that we trudge off to work every day and are becoming (or already are) parents ourselves. van sant captures the life of youth in a way that is rare, comparable only to the (unsurpassable, really) films of larry clark.

this is a piece of lengendary canadiana that i only recently (finally) got around to viewing. i can sum up my thoughts on this one by saying 'what the hell happend to canadian film post-1970?'

the story of pete (doug mcgrath) and joey (paul bradley) is a brilliant tale of two small town nova scotia boys gone big city. their tale is one of dreams, failure, and collapse.

what i enjoyed most about this film were the moments where the camera wandered with the characters along the streets of toronto. or where the characters philosophize about the concept of labour. this is real cinema about the struggle of real people. where did all the socially conscious canadian cinema go?

it's there, but not like this.

after the first few minutes of russian ark you find yourself irritated. something isn't right, you notice. perhaps it is the fact that there hasn't been a single cut in the film?

aleksandr sokurov brings us his unique vision of russian history through the medium of the hermitage museum. his camera follow a one-take (i repeat, one take) arc through a dialogue of russian history and culture.

the camera pursues a stranger through the hermitage on a course that tracks hundreds of years of development in russian history. if you know nothing of russian history this film will likely bore you silly, beyond the pure aesthetics of sokurov's cinematically delicious vision. however, if you can follow the events and characters you will find yourself treated with a commentary on the development of russia through several troubling time periods.

what the non-russophile may find more stimulating is the bonus documentary that traces the development and realisation of the film. for instance, it is impossible not to be astounded by the incomparable (borderline inhuman) steadicam work of tilman büttner. tilman is the kind of cinematographer you can only hope to work with as a filmmaker.

russian ark is a technical feat worthy of admiration, regardless of how much you appreciate russian culture. while you get the feeling that the one-take film is something of a gimmick (i didn't know this was a one-take film until watching the documentary, and thought i saw convenient cut points throughout), sokurov's intent is compelling.

stumbled across this on an aboriginal television station. haven't seen it in almost a decade, since its original release in 1995.

while i recall being absolutely smitten with the original, the stiltedness of the acting and dialogue was even more apparent this go round. still, this is an amusing film.

a younger johnny depp ('william blake'), as well as a wonderful performance by gary farmer ('nobody'), make this necessary viewing. not to mention bit parts by everyone from crispen glover, iggy pop, billy bob thornton, steve buscemi, jared harris, robert mitchum, john hurt, gabrielle byrne, and beyond.

neil young's soundtrack does a lot to hold this film together. without it i dont' know if the transition sequences would work nearly as well, or if the general ambiance of the film would be as stunning.

for some reason i recall liking jarmusch's down by law a good deal, although it's been forever and half since i've seen that. i'll have to see if i can drum up a copy to confirm if it is as good as i remember.
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i dug up journal notes of what i thought of dead man the first time round. funny that i found down by law noteworthy at the time, as well.

strange reading what kind of mini-reviews i was writing back then. i wrote journal entries like i was writing to another person (i treated the journal as another person). same thing now in some ways. i'm not writing for other people, i'm writing for my computer. same intent, different medium. made the transition from private journaling to posting the entries online pretty simple.

bizarre. johnny depp is really great in this quirky flick about the unexpected being thrust on a simple person. (accountant accused of murder). interesting how he deals with the uncertainty of becoming a "killer." the native, who mistakes depps character 'william blake' as a living dead version of the poet, is hilarious (can't recall his name). the film is a meditative exploration of the self. also recommend his down by law starring tom waits and roberto benigni.

mira nair seems about the right person to take on vanity fair. reese witherspoon, though? i'm not sure. gabriel byrne is perfectly nasty and what more can possibly be said about bob hoskins or jim broadbent? but reese witherspoon? i tried to like her, i really did. i'm just not a big fan of her style. the film is well shot and there are plenty of lovely scenes, but i didn't feel great about it in the end. i also didn't feel bad about it. kind of indifferent, really.

monsoon wedding, however, is more my style. after attending a muslim wedding in derby this summer we naturally watched nair's earlier effort as soon as we were back hanging out in london. it's a fantastic film, dealing with serious and difficult subject matter with skill without losing the overall exuberance of the characters and plot. vijay raaz, who plays the flower-eating, cellphone-toting p.k. dubey, is brilliant. on the top of my dream list of actors i would want to cast in one of my films. he has the most incredible face, filled with anguish and determination. monsoon wedding has a top-notch cast all around (like roshan seth, also memorable as nehru in attenborough's gandhi).

when i think of mira nair, though, the first film that comes to mind is salaam bombay!. a tremendous film. krishna (shafiq syed) and chillum (raghuvir yadav) show us what acting is all about. many of the children in it grew up and haven't been in another movie. shafiq syed, for instance, has the following bio note in the imdb: " Is currently (2004) living in Bangalore with his family where he repairs auto-rickshaws."

nair really made something special by enlisting real street kids as actors. they give the film its authenticity and intensity, and make it unforgettable.

i can't think of this film without hearing "chaipau!"

i had the chance to do nothing for a few hours yesterday so i was looking forward to watching a movie. went and watched what the bleep do we know?!.

overall, the film raises some interesting points about what concepts in quantum physics do to our perception of ideology and existence.

it doesn't go nearly far enough. this stuff is not new to anyone who's read philip k. dick. multiple realities and states of being, combined with an exploration of how we normally take our physical complexity for granted.

marlee matlin does the best she can with a really idiotic storyline. why does this movie need a storyline? and the section about sex and attraction goes on far too long without being very informative. it feels cheap and pointless.

the talking heads throughout offer up some well-spoken clarity to the general concepts discussed, though. you can't help but feel jz knight (ramtha) is trying to take you for a ride (the kind where you wind up in the woods, dazed, without your wallet). the rest of the speakers don't try to push the profound on you quite as badly.

it seems to me that poststructuralist thought already destroys the concept of the binary and makes us conscious of plurality as a necessary perspective on the world. the film uses quantum physics more to re-construct a notion of the godhead, displacing the old with the new. in this regard, a quantum view is just another ideology. but one that is vastly more accepting of the complex realities we inhabit.

had this been done as a straight-forward documentary i think it still could have had mass appeal. the film dumbs itself down in order to get a wide audience at the expense of being a good film. what the fuck do we know? more than the filmmakers give us credit for.

perhaps a worthwhile starting point if you aren't at all familiar with quantum physics and have never considered that reality and existence are a little more complicated than we've been led to believe. it's unlikely, though, that the people who really need to watch this movie will.

had the chance to put together visuals for a show at blim. it was billed as a "night of ambience and mayhem".

there was an extra musician that snuck in a set, so the evening ended up being about four hours long. i had mostly worked on the visuals with subtractivelad's music in mind, but i think they worked for all the acts. it wasn't a huge crowd, but blim is a cozy space that doesn't take many people to make the atmosphere comfortable. drifty, dreamy electronics contrasted with aural nastiness provided the crowd a wide mix of soundscapes.

i put together a bunch of ambient video built around the idea of motion and abstraction. there were some long (20 min) loops of walking through the trails at colony farms with the manual focus set to 'blurry as hell', though these clips were a bit too bright to project as well as i'd hoped. the other stuff was mostly night driving, resulting in some great footage of fuzzy light forms dancing around slowly (mostly from footage driving on the highway between north van and coquitlam). also had one small section of the ocean filmed close up - next time i do visuals i think i'm going to play with this idea a lot more. the ocean projected well and provided a lot of visual stimulation with wide variance depending on how close i was filming to the water.

there is this cool 8 x 8 x 8 cube that you can either perform in or use for seating. i set up a laptop and projected about a thousand heavily photoshopped shots from our travel photos this summer. big thanks to whoever invented batch processing.

yuriko iga, who runs blim, deserves a heap of respect for providing an excellent venue for these kinds of things. it's people like her that help keep the arts vibrant in a lazy city like vancouver.

show at blim, vancouver, october 16th, 2004.

i still can't believe yuriko got trevor dunn to play at blim. this was one gig worth being wrecked the next day for.

i've only seen dunn perform once before, with john zorn's electric masada - perhaps the greatest live musical experience i've ever had. truly mindblowing.

this time dunn played double bass and teamed up with shelley burgon on harp. they played a few pieces that had a sinister cinematic feel. there both improv and scored pieces. shelley is really charming, and works the harp like a dangerous weapon. besides alice coltrane, i don't think i've ever heard the harp used in jazz / improv before. whereas coltrane created big washes of sound (a monastic trio), burgon focused more on plucking.

joining dunn and burgon after the intermission was brett larner on koto. the combination was dreamy (in an intense quasi-nightmare kind of way). the koto is another instrument i've only heard once before in jazz - with miya masaoka. larner added a great element, taking the intensity of the performance up a notch.

during the intermission i picked up a cd-r of dunn and burgon's live and home recordings. you can't beat the feeling of slapping cash directly into the hand of an artist, knowing that every cent goes back into helping them create their next works.

dunn is one of those sidemen who winds up on half the albums you own (various zorn, fantomas, mr bungle, junk genius) and i'm glad to see him finding time to do more work on his own, including his duo with burgon and his work with his trio convulsant. like so many of zorn's associates, dunn has his fingers in a lot of projects and they all fit him well.

show at blim, vancouver, october 20, 2004.

see that rot? imagine for a moment, if you will, what that rot smells like. having troubles? let me help you - that rot smells like the depths of reno hell. it is those same fiery depths i am going to be stepping into when we take possession of our new (circa 1909) home december 1.

the above photo is what happens to your bathroom when you don't have any sort of ventilation, nail the window shut, and take long, hot showers for years on end.

i'm seriously unbelievably excited to take on that beast of a challenge. the only website i will be visiting for the next month is the cmhc. if you see me on skytrain i will be the guy with his head stuck in building code books.

i'll try and post some photos as we strip that sucker down and build it back up.

on the other hand, you may never hear from me ever again.