Welcome to our new film roundtable, entitled amazing/never again. Recently, my good friend and courtroom videographer kyle dropped an amazing film on me:
This movie meets all of my criteria (crime, 1970s, method acting, verite pretensions, implicit class critique) but almost jumped the shark of seventies thriller-style grit and gestalt all the way into overtruthfulness and, ergo, un-watchability. Which brings me to the topic of our conversation, one I hope will carry on for all of our sakes’ for as long as possible: Which films have you seen that made you think, simultaneously, this was wonderful and i never wish to see it ever again?
In literature the works of Conrad best exemplify this weird kind of anti-transcendence for me, in which once-heroic victims of their own successful quests for truth wreck their own lives and the lives of others trying to outrun the horrors they were brave enough to confront and idiotic enough to mistake for being somehow nourishing. Some, if not all, of life’s big lessons seem to me to be dark. And some films are so good at pointing those out that I don’t need to see them more than once, artistry notwithstanding. Here’s my first submission:
Bad Timing is a film by Nicholas Roeg, the director of Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Eureka, Don’t Look Now, Insignificance and a bunch of other art-damaged features that nonetheless somehow won studio funding and influenced the whole wide subsequent world of indie rockers and auteurs.
Art Garfunkel plays a petulant, Freudian psychoanalyst prancing around Vienna, who falls in lust, love, lust, hate, lust, love with, and loses himself in pursuit of Theresa Russel. Russel herself gives a very three-dimensional performance that gestures way beyond Madonna-Whore-Femme Fatale - Film Noire Gal, and somehow positions herself in my memory, at least, as less a victim or object of Garfunkel’s narcissism than the subject, the animating presence, the magnet of desire, that moves the film. Harvey Keitel is woefully miscast as - you guessed it - an Austrian homicide detective who prevails upon the stop-start, flashback/flash-forward structure of the film’s narration, and tries in a Hitchcockian way to apply deductive reasoning in the corridors of unreason.
Is this film a critique of Freudian narcissism or a Freudian parable of the collusion of sex and violence? Is this film anti-intellectual or the masochistic face-scrubbing of an irrevocable braniac? Is it about the poison enlivening the maddening, luxurious desiring that certain sexual subjects favor, or is it about the death drive that universally haunts all of our procreative functioning? I don’t know, and I won’t soon figure it out, because this deeply flawed film is also the most probing, brilliant and unwatchable slab of film I’ve ever had to deal with. I shan’t be dealing with it again, nossir.
Now what about you? How about a title, brief synopsis, and reflection upon whatever films’ you loved enough to know better than to mess with ‘em again.
(Honorable Mentions: The Deer Hunter, A Woman Under the Influence, Compulsion....)
5 comments:
I wanted to reply to this post in its first run. My contributions:
1. Keane - This is an indie move made by Lodge Kerrigan and produced by Steven Soderbergh, not the wimpy band. From Wikipedia:
Set and filmed in New York, it stars Damian Lewis as William Keane, a schizophrenic and disturbed man trying to come to terms with the abduction of his daughter three months earlier. The film focuses on the brief relationship that Keane strikes up with a young girl and her mother who he meets in the hotel he is living in.
What this quote doesn't convey is how tense this very claustrophobic and bleak movie is, especially since it is shot almost all on handheld cameras. As the viewer you gradually start to realize that this man wandering around the outskirts of grimy districts of the big city might be just imagining that he had a daughter, but his desperation is very realistic. Remember: he's staying at one of those motels where the clerk is behind glass. Then, when he gets assigned the job of watching after the little kid of a desperate new acquaintance, it gets even more tense. Awesome movie. Don't want to see it again.
2. Jacob's Ladder - All I remember about this movie is that it was very good and I don't want to experience it again because it frightened me. Weird stairways and monsters.
Panic at Needle Park,
Punishment Park,
Bad Lieutenant,
Das Boot,
Straw Dogs,
Man Bites Dog
Requiem For A Dream
Where The Buffalo Roam
Wall-e
I was captivated or grossed out and at times or bored. But for theist part I respected the themes and the final outcome of their stories.
Possession, 1981, Andrej Zulawski. i was made to watch this film by a Nashville woman. She called me because, against better judgement, she had to watch this film a second time. Featuring stunning performances by the queen of utter alienation, Isabelle Adjani, and Patrick's real dad: Sam Neil. This film has a coldness of craft like Cronenberg imitating Lynch, and features a meltdown 'birthing' scene thet would have made Artaud blush. One person who would certainly know told me they thought this was the most accurate psychological thriller of eastern european cold war era. I simply wanted to gag myself with a speculum. I have probably watched this film 6 or 7 times.
the first thing that comes to mind for me is Boys Don't Cry. i managed to sit through the entire film by promising myself, if you can make it to the end, i promise you'll never have to see this again.
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