Sitting here in a sweatshirt because fall weather has begun to show its face, by the grace of God.
Movies
A transcendently difficult watch. I nearly quit the movie when the infant was smothered to death within fifteen minutes of the movie's opening, and while that's far-and-away the most hard-to-watch part of the film, it accurately sets the tone for what kind of movie this is: a movie about the full horror of the psychological fallout of the Soviet Union's having survived WWII. It's a movie full of pain and despair and exceptionally long pauses in dialogue, oftentimes while that pain and despair are occurring, and I somewhat hated it for a while. But by the end, I had circled around to a kind of bruised fascination, not just at the colors and cinematography (which are sumptuous, especially for a movie as otherwise dour as this) but also at its emotional sweep. I certainly don't blame anyone who finds this indulgently miserable, but there are precious few films that look at the way that the trauma of war (even "just" wars like WWII) persist long after peace is declared. Watching its two central couple flail and claw their way toward an acrid, toxic domesticity within a Stalingrad still licking its wounds from Nazi occupation is, by the end, something I found sickeningly resonant by the end of the film. I dunno, I'll probably never watch this again, but it is something. Grade: B
Meat-and-potatoes indie filmmaking. There are a lot of ellipses and things left unsaid, which feels perfect for its focus on a friendship crumbling as its two principal characters inhabit increasingly irreconcilably different places in life. This movie nails the way that these late-stage friendships can swing unpredictably from familiar intimacy to callous indifferent and disconnection—with the added dimension that these two friends are very clearly in love with one another, not the men they are with. Riley Keough and Jena Malone are terrific as the leads, to say nothing of the pair of sisters who play Keough's daughter, one when she's 3 and one after the three year time jump in the middle of the movie, when she's 6—great use of child acting here. Grade: B
A lovely little film essay about the process of making art and that art's role in the artist staking a claim in a community, as well as a great document of L.A.'s mural movement just before it was gentrified. The movie luxuriates in two of my favorite things: gigantic visual art and a vibrant cross-section of human life in the form of a community. Kind of feels like Slacker, only if everyone in that movie were painting big murals. Grade: B+
Documenteur (1981)
The most interesting part of this movie to me is the way that it folds into Mur Murs—reusing some of its footage and also giving a fictional context for that other film (e.g. the protagonist auditions to be the narrator of Mur Murs). Varda also gives us some killer shots here, like the two sex scenes (just pelvises grinding together, abstracted by how close the camera is) and the scene were part of the protagonist's face disappears in the crook of two tilted mirrors. But otherwise, I had a hard time connecting to this movie. I have a cool respect for the way it remixes Varda's own life into itself, but I never really felt the emotional urgency that Varda herself probably feels about the same subject matter. Grade: B-
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
An unnerving little chiller reminiscent of The Beguiled in the sense that it turns the screws on predatory power dynamics (often sexual though not exclusively) until they explode into a kind of queasy yet liberating violence. Terrific central performances from Jodi Foster and Martin Sheen, though I imagine Sheen had to take a long, hot shower after each day on set playing a vile scumbag like that. Grade: B
Extremely cool, semi-avant-garde treatment of Poe's story. Special kudos to Roland de Candé's very, very, very excellent score for the film on the 2001 DVD release that I watched—some Cluster-esque experimental grooves here. Grade: A-
Music
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids' last album, An Angel Fell, was about the intersection of 21st-century politics and history, a voyage that, stream-of-consciousness style, wove the ancient past into things like the death of Michael Brown. This new album, Shaman!, is doing something similar, only this time replacing the explicit politics with much more personal conduits for which history flows. Instead of national iconography like Michael Brown, we get a eulogy for free-jazz legend Cecil Taylor, who was Ackamoor's mentor; we get love songs blown up to cosmic dimensions by Ackamoor's vast arrangements. It's very cool and moving, the way that music and history and interiority all overlap in this yearning transcendence, and I like it a lot better than An Angel Fell, actually. A primo slice of spiritual jazz. Grade: A-
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