Wednesday, June 12, 2019
dosed and confused
Even without foreknowledge of neither Gaspar
Noe’s crave to goad nor any info involving a horny dance troupe and a very portentous
bowl of sangria, you know you’re headed towards a hellscape. The opening shot,
directly overhead, features a blood-soaked woman wriggling in anguish, snow-angel
style on a white snowy canvas as the end credits scroll up. I fell for it,
pushing pause and seeing if I somehow started it at the wrong place. From here
we watch interviews with the company, presumably audition videos peppered with
tidbits of data regarding their personalities, information that doesn’t really
add up to much though the ensuing perpetrator is hiding here in plain sight. This
smorgasbord of humanity is then shown in beautiful solidarity performing a
choreographed dance to Cerrone’s Supernature. For me to call this a highpoint
in this scalawag’s brash career might seem like a snide commendation as said
career has mostly annoyed the shit out me, but for once his talent isn’t eclipsed
by his true vocation to eternally stick in bourgeois festival leech’s crawl. In
this he has made a brand and stuck staunchly to it. I’ve said before that such
an aptitude is rigged to avoid any true criticism; react and out yourself as a delicate
sucker. Still, it’s nice to see him filming his actors with such adoration and
grace even if it’ll all end as it typically does with everyone either dead or worse.
These scenes are intercut with dialogue that implies certain characters are
here to either fight or fuck, some of the implications suggest that the sex won’t
be consensual and this seed is planted making much of what’s to come all the
more alarming. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that dialogue is Noe’s knack
and Climax is no exception. The aforementioned bowl of sangria has been spiked
with LSD, and I’m guessing based on everyone’s eventual ruin it was a substantial
amount. The effects don’t rear their ugly head until at least 45 minutes of
relative niceties have passed (including another dance sequence shot directly
above the performers). The preliminary shock leads to three of the dancers getting
fucked up by their troupe; one burn victim, one frozen man, and one pregnant
woman kicked in the stomach. This violence and the violence forthcoming seem to
stem from Noe’s puerile notions of foul human nature coaxed out by the acid. This
is where Climax started to lose me, but not completely. My problem with the
descent into hell wasn’t that it was horrid and disturbing (the sound of a
scared tripping 5 year old screaming for his mother, who locked him in a
storage room and lost the key, was sufficient nightmare fuel for me), it’s that
Noe can’t resist tethering contrived plot to what ought to be pure nonsensical anguish
and chaos. The worst and most unforgivable also takes up the most time; a
brother chasing down and attempting to rape his sister. This is the type of puerile
baby baiting that distracts from the genuinely revolting and oddly beautiful funhouse
of insanity strewn about the red soaked dancefloor. The callbacks only sidetrack
us and break the spell. Noe is working with a dream synopsis, so simple that it
doesn’t really require much. His need to spike this punch with reason is telling. Stop making
sense.
Monday, June 10, 2019
dragged across burning
It’s hard for me to believe that the inherent danger in
associating fictional actions with creative consent has become so widely
accepted in media discourse. It’s comical to read grown adults worry that
audiences won’t be able to discern things for themselves; as though we laymen
are simply sponges hoping to soak up our wavering values through Hollywood.
Even if this assertion occasionally holds water, I wonder what the alternative
would be. Should we implement another Hayes Code? Should there be a certificate
that said film either falls in line with a certain credo or perhaps we can slap
a certificate of approval when a movie is believed to present no clear and
present danger to progressive society. Maybe this sense of danger comes from a
voice inside us that might rationalize a wrongheaded point of view thus momentarily
walk in the shoes of a racist, misogynist, serial killer, or homophobe. I think
this same fear has alerted mega conglomerates to lace their otherwise empty
tentpoles with hints of “activism.” If you aren’t immediately wary of Disney
imploring you to see their latest superhero movie lest mouth breathing incels
take over the cinema forever (you only have one shot here guys, either pay to
see this movie or there will never be another _______ caped crusader, don’t
fuck it up), then you are a sucker. Either way, I think that within that sense
of danger we learn something perhaps unsavory about ourselves or maybe even
unsavory about evil and its enticement. As they say, the first step to redemption
is in recognizing the problem. S Craig Zahler doesn’t shy away from the
problem, including corrupt cops (the only kind) justifying their actions with
what, on the surface, seems like sound reasoning. These are the lies they tell
themselves to justify their unjustifiable actions. The imminent conjunction of cop
and thief in Dragged Across Concrete is predictable, but it’s the beats along
the way that make it so fresh and intricate. The decision to portray a dirty pair
of cops (one played by mad Mel to complicate matters) without the ethical markers
that shepherd and soothe the diffident, dwarfs the more substantial decision to
give equal if not deeper consideration to their counterpart (Tory Kittles who
deserves all of the awards). Zahler specializes in weaponizing desperation; a harbinger
for approaching carnage. In this department he might just be the current champion,
which predictably has landed him under the ever-watchful eye of milquetoast
handwringers for the foreseeable future. And at times he is irrefutably pitiless.
Take the scene involving a mother’s return to work, a scene that uses a mother’s
hardest day (the first without her child) as a revolting punchline to both
further complicate the complicity of Kittles’ character as well as fortify the
almost mystical heartlessness of a masked villain. Like the Sadfies’ Good Time,
another genre film to draw suspicion and contempt regarding its authorial provocation,
Dragged Across Concrete never feels banal or predictable, toppling nearly all narrative
and spoken clichés in its path. Here’s hoping that its financial woes don’t
prevent Zahler from continuing to shine a light on the worst of us.
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning spends the majority of its two plus hours
in the company of an isolated and horny South Korean youth tending to his
recently incarcerated father’s farmhouse in Paju. The young man’s name is
Jongsu and he is a writer, though we get very little insight outside of a
petition as to what his prose is all about. Early on, he reunites with a
childhood acquaintance from his hometown. Her name is Haemi and it’s
immediately evident that her version of reality might be slightly skewed. For
instance, we are told she has a cat whom Jongsu has been entrusted to feed and
water while she is in Africa for a short trip. We may or may not ever see this
cat at any point of the film, thus sharing his confusion as to the validity of
its existence. The importance of this cat’s existence plays a large role in
what lies ahead. Chang-dong’s careful and deliberate structure ensures that all
information pertinent to what will eventually unravel is slyly withheld; clues dangled
just tantalizingly enough to let our minds do most of the heavy lifting,
perhaps leading to a shared fixation with our tortured central character. This
method is nothing new and in fact there is a crucial pantomiming sequence that
recalls the finale of Antonioni’s Blow Up, another film about a fanatical man
turned greenhorn sleuth as a result of meticulously withheld evidence. In
Burning we learn that one character’s secret to persuasive performance is
simply believing in that which is simply not there. This is a movie full of instances
in which we are baited to do just that. Here Jongsu scrambles frantically to
find Haemi after a phone call seems to imply foul play. The main suspect is
Ben, a wealthy socialite whose company Jongsu is forced to suffer thanks to his
jealousy. Ben constantly seems amused by his newly acquired underprivileged
company and a later scene would imply that he’s been down this road before,
that the poor are simply diversions until they inevitably get tossed aside or
worse. Haemi’s disappearance is worthy case to crack, especially as cryptic
signs seem to lead further past the point of no return. A drawer full of female
possessions, a flippant mention of arson, a yawn, a bizarre trip to a lake, and
even a cat fuel the fires of distrust. Unrequited desire begets resentment and
confusion which in turn begets anger and delirium regarding our gumshoe’s increasingly
bewildered state. Even the miserable final scene contains a single line of
dialogue that only sends us further into uncertainty, which surely has left
most to rejoice and luxuriate in its scrupulous and never not beautifully
composed chaos. I couldn’t help but feel that the last twenty minutes piled it
on too thick, but I’m certainly on the outside looking in. Love hurts.
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