Saturday, February 28, 2009

I Watch Movies about time

Southland Tales (dir. Richard Kelly, USA, 2006, 145 min., watched on Instant Netflix)
This was just so much stupid fun. It's like the last few minutes of Donnie Darko done up in neon (fact: if I describe something as "done up in neon" you should probably pick up a positive connotation) and stretched for two and a half hours (also, actually fun). So much WTF in this movie, so many boneheaded references, and it makes very little sense. But the cast: the Rock, SMG, Bai Ling, Wallace Shawn, Nora Dunn, Wood Harris, Amy Poehler, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, it just goes on and on and on. And Sean William Scott is actually kinda great in this. Not a good movie per se, but probably worth your time if you love trash like I do. (Obvi it's about time travel and apocalypse).

La Jetée (dir. Chris Marker, France, 1966, 28 min., watched on DVD)
This is also about time travel and memory, though it is about a billion times more intelligent about it. It takes place in post-WWIII Paris, where an imprisoned astronaut is sent back in time through the power of his memory. Also, it's mostly just stills with narration. This was my first Chris Marker experience, and dude is super-talented. And it comes on a Criterion DVD with...

Sans Soleil (dir. Chris Marker, France, 1983, 100 min., watched on DVD)
This is an essay film, narrated by a woman reading letters w/ footage received from a (fake) cinematographer traveling the world (but mostly in Japan, with stops in Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Iceland). Again, this is largely about memory, seemingly an obsession of marker's. Past that I need more viewings and more time to think to tell you what exactly it's about, but I couldn't stop watching it and taking in both the montage and the theory. Plus, there's a section about Hitchcock's Vertigo so that's fun.

Street Trash (dir. J. Michael Muro, USA, 1987, 81 min., watched on DVD)
Matty and I were in the Bronx, and Mullin showed us this absurd bumsploitation (that's bum like homeless person, not like butt) loosely about a bum wine that turns people into neon goo. We didn't get through the whole thing, but the parts we saw had surprisingly little people-melting and was much more just about homeless people in Greenpoint going crazy. When we left there had just been some off-screen necrophilia (the corpse had been fucked to death, also mercifully off screen, by a gang of hobos), and a bunch of homeless folk were playing keep-away with another homeless dude's recently severed wang. Fun fact: the director of this went on to be the DP for (the bad) Crash.

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