—B. Kite’s ‘Movie’s Stop’— Vol. III, No. 43 ! February 22, 2008 Yearly Film Supplement to The New-York Ghost That You Print Out at Work & Take to an ‘Oscar Party’ & THEN THEY PUMMEL YOU ‘‘Too tired/to dream the way the rich dream’ —Nick Twemlow A 12-page sequel to the Morrisania ‘Action!’

DRUGS OF INFINITE PATIENCE a different time and place. They also prove Pedro Costa’s Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Andy Warhol right: watching a human being Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), and Colossal perform an ordinary set of actions in real time Youth (Juventude em marcha, 2006) arrived in my can be the most profoundly riveting and mailbox out of the blue, something that suspenseful experience. —Luc Sante doesn’t often happen to me with movies. Don’t know how else I would have seen them. ALL THIS STUPID BEAUTY Terry ¶ Long, long takes—long movies—with Southern, co-author of the original book on strictly unmoving camera; untrained actors which Candy (1968) was based, once said, playing versions of their workaday selves; ‘You’ve got to understand that it is not easy to stories that for the most part don’t appear to make a bad film—it requires a very special have been scripted but evolved over time. ¶ combination of non-talents and anti-talents.’ One character—Vanda—who recurs in all This ‘60s farrago actually combines many three; one Lisbon slum—Fontaínhas—shown mega-talents (Brando, Ringo, Rotunno— lively and teeming in the first, being destroyed Fellini’s cameraman) to create a dog’s piece by piece visibly and audibly in the breakfast that’s actually more entertaining second, and gone in the third, the inhabitants than a successful adaptation could ever have relocated to an antiseptic housing project. ¶ been. As dazzlingly beautiful and stupid as its Much conversational repetition, ruts of habit, bimbo Candide, this overblown picaresque haggling over money and drugs and work and carnival trots out Charles Aznavour as a wall- shelter, the occasional stunningly dramatic crawling hunchback, Richard Burton as randy occurrence for which you are never prepared, poet McPhisto (his bouffant hairdo constantly an absolutely hypnotic sense of you-are-there. swept by an off-screen wind machine), and, And you are indeed there, although not quite unforgivably, Ringo Starr as a Mexican intimate. ¶ You don’t know the backstory gardener. The titular all-American naïf is between this person and that one, don’t quite played by Teutonic sex foetus Ewa Aulin, catch the subtext of a given conversation— which is only the first of the film’s many but that’s one reason why you have to watch laudable mistakes. A sex comedy that’s never the three-hour picture again and again, actually sexy or funny, it is instead by turns because details accrue and matters suddenly queasy, embarrassing, gorgeous, and irksome, pop into focus on the second or third go- rather like skydiving through a kaleidoscope round. Crudely put, they might be Fassbinder wearing a nappy of dollar bills. —D. Cairns soap operas if Fassbinder had been taking drugs that conferred infinite patience and PROPHECY, THE FIRST ‘Prophecy’ - concentration, or else Dardenne Brothers the inspired utterance of a prophet, viewed as a moral fables if they had hired Georges de la declaration of divine will—’Prophecy’ doesn’t Tour as their cinematographer, or else movies have to foretell, but Southland Tales (2007), set Rivette might have made had he been born in in 2008, at least purports to do so. Among other things, the Democratic ticket is Hillary the range and depth of his talents. Particularly Clinton and Joseph Lieberman—two notable in a film career that spans Hollywood Republicans—and the Republican candidate is movies (1986’s The Flight of the Spruce Goose, the someone you never heard of who looks screenplay for Basquiat) and Beckettian familiar (‘like the guy who laid you off,’ parodies of Hollywood movies (1994’s The maybe). While Homeland Security has been Gospel According to Harry, featuring Viggo considerably beefed up after a nuclear Mortensen as a beleaguered householder terrorist attack on Abilene, the U.S. still has plunked down in a real Polish desert free speech and a free press, represented by masquerading as post-apocalyptic Los Angeles) cutaways to CNN. ¶ But CNN’s format has are his Bruno Schulzian evocation of a evolved: multiple screens like a video family’s physical and spiritual life unfolding in installation, computer graphics like a video an apartment complete with bleeding walls, a game, crawls running horizontally and tree of life, a grain harvest, and grazing vertically, sometimes simultaneously, while as miniature deer (the gorgeous The Roe’s Room many as three screens-within-the-screen [2000], his ‘autobiographical opera’ adapted to report stories unrelated to the content—or film), the Boschean Garden of Earthly Delights indeed the syntax—of the crawls, all (2002), a metaphysical love story set in Venice, programmed by a flash-card machine locked and my personal favorite after The Roe’s Room, in overdrive. ¶ Statements critical of the Bush Angelus (2000), about a group of zany Silesian administration pop up before and after—or miner-mystics who worship Saturn and next to—statements favoring its policies; wars express their fealty in primitive art works and and rumors of war; reports on crime, sex, the (attempted) sacrifice of a young male celebrity and all the other topics currently on virgin. ¶ Drawing painterly inspiration from the Italian and Dutch masters as well as the Symbolists and Surrealists, Majewski shows a A trio of necromancers who breathtaking mastery of the visual medium. might be auditioning for the But unlike so many other avant-gardists who Insane Clown Posse forsake linear narrative—Matthew Barney, are you listening?—he makes movies that are

emotionally resonant and eminently watchable view on CNN in a format that differs from as well. The DVDs are hard to get, so don’t this slightly futuristic one only in degree. ¶ pass up any opportunity to see Majewski’s The numerous intertwining plots of the film films in the theater. —Victoria Nelson produce the same neurovascular short- circuiting as the CNN screens, which are THE SEVENTH EEL The Boxer’s Omen, a supposedly there for context. ¶ The result: 1983 Shaw Brothers freakout, puts the id in reviews like: ‘…too much…’ ‘…impossible…’ lurid, with a vomited live eel, gnarly self- ‘…couldn’t…’ This is prophecy in the sense surgery, the use of an alligator corpse as a sort of foretelling—the fact that the end of the of succubus incubator, and completely world is among the things foretold here is perfunctory yet alarming boobs-against-the- hopefully just a convention of the genre. —Bill Krohn window nudity. ¶ It’s full of fake-looking spiders, fake-looking bats, and real-looking TINY DEER AND MYSTIC MINERS This ABC food, which gets passed from mouth to year’s undiscovered genius is the Polish mouth by a trio of necromancers who might theater director/filmmaker/poet/ be auditioning for the Insane Clown Posse. ¶ novelist/composer Lech Majewski, a genuine The film starts in pedestrian pugilistic mode, Hermetic Rosicrucian whose aesthetic and before mutating into a twisted Buddhist metaphysical roots lie in the Renaissance. ¶ revenger’s hell, hypnotically distended with His MoMA retrospective last year, centered long sequences of adepti inculcation. ¶ I can’t around the video installation Blood of a Poet imagine the Dalai Lama would approve—but (2007) and now traveling the country, reveals he might unleash that beautiful laugh. ¶ In its blatant artifice and flesh for fantasy, The Boxer’s Omen looks like the missing link concentration with which we’re being led to between Ed Wood and body artist Zhang see. Each image holds the screen for only a Huan. —Ed Park few seconds before fading to black, pausing there a moment before another is unveiled. WAY TO BLUE, I A few deep blue seas Or sometimes the same one is shown again. there were last year, films that take one deep The repetitions and the irregular rhythms (for into character and place from which it is very some shots are snatched away almost as soon hard to pull out. And who would want to as they appear) mime the motions of a while sitting inside of Michael Clayton, with all probing consciousness. These are someone’s that evil; La Vie en Rose, that mostly precious things. Or maybe precious is too happened inside Marie Cotillard’s throat high a term, say rather some of the incidental, and/or in her fists; but most particularly The prefabricated beauties of a life. Some shadow Walker, with the cushions. Despite the petty of that life may still be visible in them. The reviews, didn’t everyone know that the film’s inclusion of light-streaked shots taken from greatness did not have to be about more than the beginning or end of a roll underlines the the culture of upholstery and the female cats affinity between stained film and fabric. And who sit on it and hold the cards —’Carter, the last shot—a deep blue cloth, singularly we’re playing.’ said Lauren Bacall, looking sans flora or ornament—speaks loss and even distinctly Persian or maybe Calico. No one has that much-abused word transcendence as ever captured Washington in that way. Usually simply, elegantly, finally as any film I know. it is always big men, noble Mr. Smith or a lot —B. Kite of puffed up reporters or male politicians who invariably send others to their death, well, RAMBO AND RESISTANCE 2007 was a except for Mrs. Iselin in Manchurian Candidate. great year for the relationship between film ¶ Seeing Woody Harrelson, in the toupee and history, even as the list-crazy consensus scene, made me realize he should be in every moves towards an ever narrower present. But scene of every film. Tragically, he was only the most moving movie moments of 2007 briefly in No Country for Old Men, with his sky sprang from attempts at forging a fertile blue tie and sky blue eyes that matched a sky relationship to the past: the utopian beliefs in blue sky. ¶ As soon as he left the movie, I John Gianvito’s stirring poem of resistance wanted to, too. and American landscape Profit Motive and the —Toni Schlesinger Whispering Wind; the powerful sense of waste in Wakamatsu Kôji’s United Red Army, an epic FABRIC OF MEMORY Andre Bazin evocation of an absurd armed struggle in famously compared the cinematic image, the Japan (a perfect, if European, comedic chemical imprint of the real upon a strip of counterpart was Barbet Schroeder’s nifty celluloid, with Veronica’s Napkin, but terror-doc L’avocat de la terreur); the vision of Abraham Ravett’s seven-minute film Tziporah Europe past, present, and possibly its future (2007) is stitched from less ostentatious cloth: presented by Pere Portabella in The Silence an embroidered handkerchief, fabric samples Before Bach; and Visitors, the staggering stamped with red picnic grids or a scattered deconstruction of national and private history rainfall of black lines against grey, the fold and in a mere 21 minutes by forgotten master button of a cotton shirt. And always flowers, Giulio Questi. ¶ Indeed, length was not an their petals and stems rendered sometimes in issue in 2007: Some of its finest (Wakamatsu, silvery pink and green thread, sometimes Wiseman’s State Legislature) went way beyond pressed flat and brown, sometimes simplified 3 hours, others needed hardly 3 minutes—like to cartoon contours or exfoliating in a jagged Manoel De Oliveira’s subversive, great place-mat expressionism. ¶ As with most of contribution to the mostly mortifiyng Cannes Ravett’s work, there are layers of personal anniversary omnibus, or the trailer for Rambo, history here. It is not necessary to unravel the first one in a long, long time to actually them in order to appreciate what we’re being excite me: ‘Killing is like breathing for him.’ shown, or rather the quiet persistence and (Take that, Coens.) —Christoph Huber in flagrante, forcing himself upon Yuki. ¶ AVANT-RETRO A tourist, his wife, Given that the sum of Madame’s time on- his child, and his mistress arrive at night in a screen attests to her repulsion over the tiny Spanish town where a fugitive murderer husband’s loutishness and cruel liaisons, does is sought… 10.30 P.M. Summer, Jules Dassin’s this sex, hidden in plain view, constitute the 1966 arthouse smash-flop is the film that time same sort of ‘marital rape’ that we find in forgot. The hands that clap, Spanish-dance- Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)? ¶ To answer this, style, in the opening creds are the only we must consider Yuki’s confession to her applause this movie ever received. ¶ It was ‘platonic friend’ the koto instructor: ‘Despite ahead of its time in terms of nudity, implied my feelings, my body accepts, against me, my lesbianism, and aesthetics: It seems to husband’s love. A demon lives in the female anticipate aspects of later Fellini and body; each time I see that man, the demon Antonioni, while also harking back to silent- dominates me.’ ¶ Hamako’s observation of movie storytelling and melodrama, particularly Yuki’s sexual servility plays as indoctrination, in Melina Mercouri’s her-face-in-your-face the education of a housekeeper—with every performance. Gabor Pogany’s fluorescent reaction shot, it’s emphasized that Hamako is colour photography will tie-dye your retinas, but in a good way. The hyped-up quality seems very modern, commercial, almost Tony It was ahead of its time in Scott–like, while the narrative is elusive, terms of nudity, implied mysterioso. As drama, it may only be a curio. lesbianism, and aesthetics As a piece of pure cinema, it’s pyrotechnic stuff. —D. Cairns the surveyor, that her shock is the show, that

we can rely on our assumptions of the sight INTIMATIONS OF THE KNOWN seen. ¶ Compulsion is dominant. ¶ The There’s a hardened notion that we love protagonist thus figures not as our own cinema because it shows us that which we double but as our avatar, navigating a have not experienced directly or because it labyrinth of ‘the known’ (we’ve charted hurls us inside, makes us part of, the similar courses in Vertigo (1958) and Blue experience on-screen. ¶ Were we to buy into Velvet (1986) too)—why else all the caesuras, the notion, our movie-watching would seem the scenes that fade to black without warning? hardly more substantial than Emma Bovary’s When Yuki steals out of her lunar room to reading habits (funny though, the day the spend the night with her husband, the camera films the piano at the lake is the day implication is that she has given herself over we’ve really got something). So as the years to the four-way orgy proposed earlier that pass and the contra-distinctions proliferate, evening in the presence of the husband’s the cinema I love most is that which shows mistress and a male associate (—yes, fade to me what I already know and this is, maybe, black); when a pair of geisha arrive to service surprise enough—an imitation of the inside, a the husband, the two first flank Yuki, rising cant I comprehend or jeu de piste or, cards on gently and shuffling forward into the fade- the table now, secret ‘show’—a film that out... ¶ What Mizoguchi sets up, really speaks in passwords, malavoglia and non happens. And so we move forward, onward, sanctum. ¶ In Kenji Mizoguchi’s Portrait of gliding not along with but behind Hamako Madame Yuki (1950), Hamako, a young who can only stumble upon all that we already maidservant, enters the service of a sense. (Buried from view, but also present, yes, gentlewoman whose open-close rapport with is the rumored ‘pornographic’ sequence cut by her foster-brother husband, vaginal-peristaltic, the Japanese, i.e. occupying American, pulls in the forces that ultimately lead the censors...) Inevitability colors the film, an titular Yuki to die by her own hand. Docile inevitability exactly in line with Mizo’s mise- Hamako from day one serves as solitary en-scène: the trademark ‘diagonal’ tracking- witness to the unseen, at least that which shot that traces out the slash of a blade—that remains ‘invisible’ to the spectator: the master positions Yuki to drown in a lake, and at all—maybe they were used to such turnouts, Hamako to peer at the corpse which, for the maybe it was par for the course, and I was just viewer, must remain off-screen. For projecting? Finally, I joined the throng—or Mizoguchi never films discovery. Stabbed in whatever the opposite of throng is—and the back unawares by a prostitute at 27 and waited for them to play, and it was only after from then on exploiting the cinema’s power Rudder and Rice were well into their set to tell one’s secret by keeping silent, he is the (which rocked) did I realize not just how our filmmaker for whom the crescent moon and exchange possessed a fairly Bujalskian tinge, the razor became synonymous—accordingly, but how it would have been so much better— he films destiny, and adheres to its codes. and funnier—had A.B. scripted it himself. —Craig Keller —Jason McBride

AWKWARD PAUSE I feel like I spent THE PLUCK OF THE IRISH almost all of my 2007 movie time watching Launder and Gilliat, the screenwriters of and re-watching Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes formed a Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005). producing/directing team and created the Some might consider Bujalski merely a more whimsical thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946), cuddly Cassavetes, but there’s something with Deborah Kerr as a plucky Irish colleen bracing about his films, a guileless, slow drip off to London to join the IRA and falling in of baffled emotion that both Wes Anderson with Nazi spies. Reprogrammed by her love and Noah Baumbach could benefit from. On for English agent Trevor Howard, she a related note, I also saw Bishop Allen play for endures expressionist nightmares and takes the first time at Lee’s Palace (a Toronto club), part in a funeral parade chase sequence (was Rene and the audience was probably the smallest— Clair’s Entr’acte on someone’s mind?). It all 50, 60 people maybe—I’ve ever seen there. I climaxes with a big slapstick fight in a bathroom! was also a little shocked to see both Christian Playing like a collision between two or three Rudder and Justin Rice (stars respectively of different movies, this is a delightful folly. Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation) —D. Cairns manning the merch table. I didn’t hide my surprise well. To Rudder, I yelled over the PROPHECY, THE SECOND opening act, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Uh, I ‘Prophecy’ as a cinematic genre can also take play in the band.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, having assumed as its subject the past. Ang Lee did that in the that because Rice was the one who performed best American film of the ‘90s, The Ice Storm in Mutual Appreciation, he was the only guy in (1997), which takes place mostly on the band, but even more slightly confused Thanksgiving 1973 and the day before, the anyway because to my mind they were such 10th anniversary of the JFK assassination, celebrities that selling T-shirts would have been which is never referred to in the film. Besides something they left behind long ago.¶ I asked Watergate, present on TV in the film, 1973 if he and Rice were going to be in the next was the year when the ‘Carter recession’ A.B. film, which had already begun shooting. started (Where did you first hear those words? He said, no, that the filmmaker liked to use Can you remember? What year was Carter different leads in each film. He was smiling elected?) and the ’60s started coming to an goofily (as he does throughout Funny Ha Ha), end. ¶ Not long after the film was released in but still looked vaguely disappointed. ¶ I 1997 a Republican-controlled Congress stood there, debating whether I should buy avenged Nixon by impeaching Bill Clinton for something, but I had already down-loaded all being on the receiving end of the sex act the music and there were no T-shirts. ¶ This glorified in Deep Throat (1972), the ‘crossover’ moment went on forever, me not buying porn film the characters in Ice Storm discuss anything, unable to think of anything else to over dinner. (In 1973, that title was also being say, and desperately trying not to apologize for bandied in the press as the name of the teeny crowd, which might have, obviously, Woodward and Bernstein’s confidential White made them feel worse. If, in fact, they felt bad House source on the activities of the Committee to Reelect the President.) And made, and, arguably, the most satisfying shortly after the Case of the Cum-Stained spectacle of people yelling at each other and Dress, George Bush Jr. got within stealing gesticulating wildly with their hands. distance of the White House using Nixon’s Beginning with a wall falling off a building Southern Strategy to exploit divisions in the into a crowded street—and it certainly doesn’t electorate dating back to the Civil War (the look like a special effect—and continuing subject of Ride with the Devil (1999), Lee’s through 100 minutes of meetings, follow-up to Ice Storm). Memory is short; negotiations, threats, brawls, showdowns, History, long. ¶ Lee likes to film tipping standoffs, harangues, and donnybrooks, the points. He does so again in Lust, Caution movie traces the clearance of the Naples (2007), set in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong slums, the efforts of a few idealists to fight the and Shanghai during World War II. A Popular machine, and the eventual triumph of the Front has been formed to resist the Japanese, sweetheart deal. The plot will seem all too and the eventual upshot of that will be the familiar to New Yorkers, but the execution opposite of the upshot of the Popular Front has a lot more style than they’re used to. in Europe: We’re seeing the last days of There is not a grain of pandering to sentiment Chiang Kai-shek’s China, before the here, any more than there is any attempt to Generalissimo moved to Taiwan and Ang force an optimistic ending to the mess. Lee’s parents followed. Three decades later, —Luc Sante the descendants of the young communist cell in Lust, Caution—a well-meaning bunch who WAY TO BLUE, II have chosen to make a career of trying to kill Speaking of blue, there was a woman from Tony Leung—would murder Lee’s England on a ship recently and she was grandparents during the Cultural Revolution. discussing how she had chosen to swim with ¶ The mah-jongg sequences portray with nice sting rays in Moorea—’They have the most economy a merchant class seen through their beautiful heads,’ she said in that ringy, English stay-at-home wives and the way they talk to way. ¶ Then she was going to frolic with each other. This is the tipping point that dolphins on another day and let’s not forget produced the Two Chinas of the present day, the whales. ‘I am certain I was a mermaid in one bourgeois and one in the process of another life.’ As she was talking, I lost sight of becoming it. Since the latter may well take the her and became taken with the memory of place of the U.S. as the dominant nation on watching Glynis John gobble cockles in a the planet, the moment in history that Lee British film about a mermaid —she eats so portrays, which is still our present (like 1973), many cockles because she’s been on land for can serve as backdrop for prophecy in the form of a tragic love story: Notorious with sex scenes and Cary Grant shoved to the sidelines to focus on the perverse marriage of Rains and Bergman. ¶ Their story may need to be seen a couple of times for the nuances, because the filmmaking is so subtle that the two characters can come off as opaque, but you know what they’re feeling throughout if you’re paying attention. Knowing the tragic conclusion they’re headed for, I suspect, would just make them more poignant. —Bill Krohn Working on some Night Moves, mmm hmm, trying to make some front page driving news…wait, what do those words mean??? Is this a song about—trucking? GESTICULATING WILDLY [Phone rings] Oh wait: !drive-in news"! Wow. All these Hands over the City (Le Mani sulla città, 1963), years, I thought—yeah. Got it. OK. Thanks. [Pause] So by Francesco Rosi, is both the most blistering the guy works for Variety? movie about real-estate shenanigans ever so long and is starved. As the thought of seeming as fresh as this morning’s muffins. I Glynis and cockles took over, film pushed out didn’t see I-Be Area (2007) at Elizabeth Dee, life, as it always does, and never so much as but have been experiencing it piecemeal when I met the man who owns a trailer park online, and I can’t imagine watching the in the dark red, rocky shadow of Sedona. He whole hour-and-forty-eight-minute thing in looked exactly like Gene Hackman. Very one sitting. It’s unbelievably exhausting, for quickly, while he was talking, he became the one thing: its infinite and intense ironies, lol lead of a dark, murderous, fitful drama, with humor, and brain-scramblingly complex money deals, and sex deals until one was dissection of digital culture moves fast. Going forced to watch Night Moves (1975) for the 20th, out into the real world after huddling over 50th time. Dolphins there, too. ¶ All of these your laptop for an hour is like emerging from ship stories relate to a recent South Pacific a car wash you’ve just ridden your bike voyage during which there was no film more through, high on ketamine. Adjectives are immersive than The Good Shepherd (2006), a movie so wonderful I think I mentioned it last The most blistering movie about year. ¶ On one stormy night, as the ship plunged in the front, rose in the back, plunged real-estate shenanigans ever made! in the front, rose in the back, in a cabin, on a DVD screen there could be seen a tiny ship inadequate, as are discussions of the tape’s inside a glass watch—a secret voyage, keeping ‘YouTube aesthetic’—sure, it’s a work that time—and one man saying: How was the wouldn’t exist without the Internet, but then fishing? The other: ‘It was a bad year. The so is Sasha Grey. More compelling than the water’s too high.’ —Toni Schlesinger context of its production (or the Jason Rhoades-meets–Sue de Beer–style sets, alpha AUDACIOUS DRIVEL The Return of Dr. video trickery and the nods to Leigh Bowery Mabuse (1961), the first of the Dr. Mabuse maquillage) is the tape’s singular dialogue, a sequels made by hands other than those of mash-up of tweenspeak, TV catchphrases, meister-mind Fritz Lang, is a silly pot-boiler that upended New Age platitudes, and repetitive strains with gusto and pomp, a bit like non-sequiturs, all riffing on the impossible bulbous star Gert Fröbe. A cracking, hectic, insufficiency of language and self. (Example: serial-like paranoid adventure yarn, it debases ‘I think I just saw a highly advanced 3-D text Lang’s mythos to Flash Gordon levels of message of my future self giving me the Cheese and Corn, but those were always middle finger and I’m gonna f-ck right back in among the principle ingredients anyway. his face.’) Performed in an array of cadences, Lang’s gravitas and topical sturm und drang is put-on accents and electronically-altered altogether missing, so what we’re left with is a voices by a communal troupe summoned heady mix of Kafkaesque espionage and from the basement of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, audacious pulp drivel. Director Harald Reinl it’ll make you stop moping about no new 30 had a strong yet unrecognised career making Rock episodes. —Jason McBride German Krimi and Italian Gialli, and his first wife, Bond girl Karin Dor, adds welcome THE MISSING PIECE The longest movie class and glamour to this pacy caper. His I have ever seen that didn’t seem nearly long second wife, alas, shot him dead. enough. I missed it in the theaters, caught —D. Cairns Inland Empire on DVD, after it was over watched every single dull disk extra hoping to MUFFIN FRESH AND QUEER AS derive any kind of additional clue. ¶ I don’t TUESDAY Ryan Trecartin’s videos think I’m all that literal-minded, and I flatter somehow quote the entire history of queer myself that I don’t suffer from deficient (and queerish) televisual culture (just for negative capability, but here it felt as if an starters: Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, George essential piece of information had been Kuchar, John Waters, Paul McCarthy, Sadie withheld, leaving all the suggestive Benning, Strangers With Candy) while still components of the picture to drift around untethered in the ether. ¶ Item by item I loved Hwang Sok-yong’s recently translated The those components—the stage play featuring Guest? ¶ I was still freshly unemployed and giant rabbits, the sudden switches between thought this would be a great piece to sell to Los Angeles and Lvov and dry-gulch rural an adventurous cultural periodical, be it online America, the many lives of Laura Dern—but or on paper! ¶ I am so wrong about so many they failed to cohere inexplicably as such things! ¶ I never pitched this genius idea things do when Lynch is working at full anywhere, partly out of laziness, partly power. I suspect he didn’t know what that because I never managed to finish The Guest. missing piece of information was, either. ¶ It sat on the night-stand, taunting me. ¶ For —Luc Sante ‘finish,’ read ‘start’!¶ ‘South Korea is both guest and host in two recent cultural exports,’ The Haunted Brain Toute la mémoire du the lede sentence would run. ¶ No, no. ¶ I monde (1956), Alain Resnais’ most epic film is could hear my imaginary audience yawning. ¶ a short documentary about a library. ¶ Alter- I still think it’s a pretty hot idea, though. ¶ nately viewed as a Prison, a Labyrinth, and an Maybe this year? —Ed Park Amazing Colossal Brain, the National Library in Paris becomes a limitless Marienbad of books, DYSTOPIAN PINBALL The Final for Resnais’ camera to prowl through like a Programme (1973) is a shiny sci-fi James Bond ghost condemned to walk forever. from the seventies takes Michael Moorcock’s Ladbroke Grove anti-hero Jerry Cornelius and assembles a punky, dystopian pinball machine for him to bounce around in. Robert Fuest, writer-director-designer, creates a low-budget epic, throwing money at some scenes and making do with nothing elsewhere. His rogues’ gallery of international hambones (Sterling Hayden, Patrick Magee, George Coulouris) support a fairly ramshackle plot, but the combined star power of Jon Finch (a revelation in black nail polish and frock coat) and Jenny Runacre (the only woman ever to Don"t walk away, Resnais: Aide de Mémoire win the drag queens’ Alternative Miss World Competition) light up this pop-art- Abrupt edits scissor the unceasing drifts of apocalypse.—D. Cairns the camera/narrator/audience into bite-sized fragments of hypnotic motion, sharply THE FINAL PROPHECY Remember the interrupted by percussive static shots showing scene in Punch Drunk Love (2002) where Adam signs delineating different branches of human Sandler, angered by a phone call from a knowledge, or different lobes of this giant hardware store in Provo, Utah, flies there thinking apparatus, in which individual from Los Angeles and walks into the store readers appear like worker ants or dedicated still holding the ripped-out telephone neurons, beavering away at their many tasks, receiver?¶ It sets the tone for the whole third in reality all part on one big task, which may act of There Will Be Blood (2007), Paul Thomas one day ‘solve the problem of happiness.’ Anderson’s new film about the origins of the —D. Cairns ahl bidness and them teevee preachers. ¶ Upton Sinclair fans looking for a faithful THE NEW-YORK HOST I’m a big screen adaptation would do better to rent the Bong man—Bong Joon-ho, that is!—and 1967 film the Walt Disney Studios made of when his monster-movie breakthrough The Sinclair’s ecological fairytale The Gnome-Mobile. Host was about to hit U.S. screens I thought, Audiences who elect There Will Be Blood will be wouldn’t it be great to write a piece in for a different kind of ride. Gone are the comparing The Host to South Korean novelist political speeches—in fact much of the first 15 minutes are spent underground in the dark the man and the mute boy, strongly supported with turn-of-the-century wildcatter Daniel by Paul Dano, a relative newcomer playing the Plainview, who doesn’t speak until his first ambitious farmer’s son Eli Sunday, who steals well comes in, killing a roughneck who always the movie with his first big scene as an brought his baby with him to work. ¶ evangelical preacher. It would be impossible Plainview adopts the child. The film leaps a to make a film about these characters that decade into the future. The soundtrack swells didn’t wake echoes of current events, but they with his voice introducing himself to a arise within the confines of what Anderson roomful of wary farmers, young ‘H.W.’ at his correctly describes as ‘a horror film,’ an echo side to assure them that he’s a staunch chamber that is also filled with reverberations believer in family values. And the screen fills of many earlier films. ¶ For one thing, the title with the first close-up of Daniel Day-Lewis as is taken from the advertising copy-line for Saw Daniel Plainview, a next-generation II (2005), which is a smart choice marketing- descendant of Herman Melville’s Confidence wise because serial killers sell, and if your Man. ¶ It’s quite an entrance, made a trifle movie is about one, an ad line like ‘He Knows odd by Day-Lewis’s Rich Little imitation of You’re Alone’ (which I offer for free to Walter Huston, a great Irish-American actor anyone making a film about some notable whose leprechaun eyes never gave anything advance in the decline of American away while daring audiences to assume the democracy) beats a quote from Yeats (or from worst. Day-Lewis acts in this vein of the Bible: 12% of Americans, according to controlled brilliance for most of the film, and Gallup, think that Noah was married to Joan thespian fireworks take a back seat to visual of Arc). ¶ One caveat: As Plainview starts to ones, which reach their Wagnerian apotheosis go mad and the film leaps into the ‘20s, Day- in the sequence where Plainview pulls in his Lewis and Dano are encouraged to take first gusher and his adopted son is deafened unwise chances with their characters in order by the blast. ¶ After that, the film focuses on to deliver the blood promised by the title— made from equal parts of oil and holy water— in the last scene. When Stanley Kubrick (Elijah to Anderson’s Elishah, Anderson hopes) encouraged Jack Nicholson to take those kinds of chances in The Shining (1980), the horror film Anderson would like to have made, they shot for a year to get it right. ¶ Day-Lewis, who didn’t have that luxury, caps a performance that has won awards with a series of scenes where the character, an actor all along, has turned into an actor who is out of control. Indeed it’s hard to know if the memorable last line, which he delivers with his back to the camera, is being spoken by Plainview or the actor playing him: ‘I’m done!’ —Bill Krohn

My Own Private Maddin This past Christmas, my best pal, Derek McCormack, gave me an unbelievable gift: my very own Guy Maddin movie. ¶ He didn’t just give it to me—he commissioned it, wrote it, did props and sets, and served as location scout and best boy. G.M., in Toronto just before the holidays, provided a day of his time, a Super 8 camera, Fodder for the next PTA film? Let!s hope so! and his inimitable style. The result: The Morbid Ecstasy of a Catnip Santa (2007). It’s Maddin’s Puce Moment, his Puss Moment. ¶ Three B. KITE’S MOVIE’S STOP IS silent, black and white minutes in which a cat AN ANNUAL PUBLICATION OF (played by our friends’ feline, Figo, rhymes ‘THE NEW-YORK GHOST’ with Vigo) is bewitched by the titular Saint Nick, a top-shaped plaything engorged with addling, aromatic catnip. ¶ (G.M. has offered ! to upload the film to YouTube, but I’m still feeling somewhat possessive, so allow this GUEST EDITOR: B. KITE brief summarization to satisfy your curiosity.) ¶ As Figo grows fuddled, the film becomes accordingly frenetic: Christmas tree PHOTO PROCURER: CRAIG KELLER ornaments bob and shiver, the tree itself shimmies. ¶ A spotlight catches the cat’s eye.

¶ The camera zooms in on an innocent INTERNS: ED PARK, DJANGO SOUMBASAKIS, gingerbread house, its front door adorned MERCY PANG with a peppermint, its swirl like a hypnotist’s wheel. Trippy! Cozy! Time speeds up: it’s a CONTINUITY: DUNCAN PARK

FONT FOR CAPTIONS: HELVETICA

MANY THANKS TO ALL OUR WRITERS, AND APOLOGIES TO CHRISTOPH HUBER, WHOSE OTHER FINE ENTRY COULD NOT BE PRINTED DUE TO PUNCTUATIONAL GREMLINS—FOR A COPY, PLEASE DROP US A LINE

GUY MADDIN PLEASE MAKE A MOVIE You won"t see me: Maddin"s Morbid Ecstasy CALLED ‘THE NEW-YORK GHOST’ AND SET Photo: Jason McBride, the lucky b-st-rd IT IN WINNIPEG AND LET IT STAR JASON MCBRIDE Figo frenzy. Finally, the cat’s head lolls backwards, as if he were reclining in an opium den. Other ornaments—a deer, glass birds— SYLVESTER STALLONE PLEASE SET THE become excited, or envious. Bulbs blaze. NEXT ‘RAMBO’ IN NEW YORK, YOU CAN DO Paper snowflakes—handmade by D.M.— A JOINT SEQUEL WITH THE ‘DIE HARD’ swirl. The film goes white, as white as a fake FRANCHISE AND ALSO WOODY ALLEN beard, as white as artificial snow. It’s a Christmas miracle. —Jason McBride PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LET ME GET WHAT I WANT THIS TIME

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The Ghost says: Now go watch some movies!

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