Sunday, December 23, 2012

Top 12 Movies of 2012

2012 Favorites

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12. In Another Country [Dareun naraeseo] by Hong Sang-soo

The latest installment in the Hong universe puts Huppert off-center in a messy humid context and deceptive mise-en-scène. The cuts are very elegant, and audacious techniques like the HSS trademark digital zoom make perfunctory attempts at solidifying the lead's now-elfin presence in flitty summer garments which by their nature destabilize whatever structural operations one might ascribe to the masterplan at play. She also brings with her colonial associations or orientalist weight. Hong, of course, lives within the land of the living, and remains one of the greatest, least pretentious, directors in the world, the South Korean maker of endless minor masterpieces.

11. Marvin Seth and Stanley by Stephen Gurewitz

The debut feature from Stephen Gurewitz played the inaugural La Di Da Festival in New York a few months ago. Star turns from its essentially three-person cast who constitute the family Greenstein: Marvin Gurewitz, Stephen's father, a gentle and selfless optimist who takes no small amount of shit from Seth (Alex Karpovsky in his most-dickish role to date) while Stanley (Gurewitz) plays the middle-ground. Yet another goddamn road trip movie in a year full of them and there are probably more to come — I've read four road trip scripts and twelve road trip treatments in the last twelve months. And I couldn't tell you when the last time was I went on a road trip. Actually it was two years ago; my friend had to go perform a deposition in Virginia: the destination town center memorialized with a bronze cube the spot where once stood a slave auction block. On the drive back we stopped at a truck stop where a bus-load of inconceivably beautiful co-eds from Madrid got their first taste of Roy Rogers. The final scene with Karpovsky's come-around is expertly conceived, and the opening is brilliantly and hilariously acted by Gurewitz who veers toward violent conflict with a cab driver over carrying luggage — it's like something out of a midget-Chinese Bookie.

10. Red Flag by Alex Karpovsky

The second film in a year from Alex Karpovsky (I still haven't seen Rubberneck) about his road trip to self-promote his earlier feature Woodpecker after breaking up with a girlfriend (Caroline White, underused) with whom he makes an ambivalent attempt to reconnect following a one-night stand mid-tour with an obsessive groupie (Jennifer Prediger, superb here and as funny as in Richard's Wedding by Onur Tukel, who also appears). A film of caution signals, as the title indicates: reckless sex, reckless love, perils of obsession and of obsession's flip-side: self-absorption, self-involvement — in one word less, total fucking narcissism. Maybe the last word of the micro-budget meta-film. Best shot in the film: Caroline White looks up from the kitchen table during Karpovsky's streaming rationalization: the best are-you-KIDDING-me expression ever filmed.

9. This Is 40 by Judd Apatow

Yesterday I wrote something on Twitter: "Loved it. Sprawling + relaxed + hilarious. Also, Maude Apatow is amazing. I don't think I've seen anyone do aggrieved outrage better." I don't have much more to add. Except that there's no point in directors shooting in 2.35:1 anymore, although it's turned into something of a Hollywood standard — they're not framing Moonfleet, and in six months' time when the film is seen from that point in perpetuity only on 16x9 flatscreens, it's either going to be letterboxed (Blu-ray/DVD/VOD) or (when it appears on cable) cropped to 1.78:1. Whichever way you see it, the Albert Brooks, Melissa McCarthy, and Charlyne Yi scenes will blow you away, too.

8. The Comedy by Rick Alverson

Brilliant, upsetting, hypnotic, and sincerely funny rendition of a possible trust-fund dude (Tim Heidecker) who incarnates the existential end-point of "Irony," emotional detachment, and (not ennui) passionlessness. It's a reset of Gus Van Sant's (remember him?) Last Days, Kurt Cobain dead now for over 18 years. Alverson's previous feature, New Jerusalem, starring the great Will Oldham, is now available on VOD — I haven't seen it yet, but can't wait to.

7. The Unspeakable Act by Dan Sallitt

The gorgeous, deep, third feature film of Dan Sallitt (pronounced "Suh-LEET"), centered around the breakout performance of Tallie Medel, who is probably my favorite actress besides Juliette Binoche. I did a long interview with Dan that was published around the time of its summer world premiere at BAMcinémafest and goes pretty into-depth on the film, which you can read here. And I made a short film with Tallie which you can watch here.

6. Sound of My Voice by Zal Batmanglij

A small concise debut feature about the infiltration of a charismatic Southern California cult-leader/would-be messiah's inner sanctum. It nails suburban middle-class houses and points to the untold stories that take place behind the windows that open onto drywall and landlord beige. Recessed spotlights in kitchens. Actually suspenseful script. There's a recurring set-up that has to do with the two protagonists (Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicius) prepping for meetings with the leader — clip-snap-pop insert-shots of the ritual, but the sequence gets shorter every time and what at first instance comes off as a crappy American genre-movie technique for moving the story along eventually metamorphoses into dismissive shorthand telegraphs. Genuinely suspenseful, closes genuinely unsettlingly with a non-shitty pay-off. This is a B-programmer that plays like an A-movie, in the way some Siodmak films used to, and not in the sense of cinephile apologia for the higher-Rotten-Tomatoes superhero flicks. Fox Searchlight should keep bankrolling pictures of this scale and have them be put together by the same team. The cult-leader "Maggie" is played by Brit Marling, who co-wrote the script with Batmanglij, and who starred in and co-wrote with director Mike Cahill Another Earth, and who said in an interview I read or watched that she and Batmanglij would like to make two more movies continuing the story from Sound of My Voice. For me, and to show why I'd only recommend this picture, Marling is my favorite young American actress besides Tallie Medel. Batmanglij's new film The East, also starring and co-written by Marling, will premiere at Sundance next month, and also stars Ellen Page, Alexander Skarsård, and Julia Ormond. It's the Sundance film I'm most anticipating besides Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess.

5. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim

I think I paid $30 on OnDemand to see this, because I watched it three times. I'm not usually in the mood for invoking au courant critical receptions of movies, because I couldn't give a shit. Here, I'll break my disinclination in order to say that most of the "takes" on this film are fucking insane. Despite Will Ferrell's presence (who, here, is not terrible), this is easily the funniest movie since parts of Borat, since some parts of In the Loop and Four Lions, since Clifford, since Freddy Got Fingered. It's the anti-Blues Brothers, which is, always has been, a complete piece of shit. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is the most ruthless and incendiary take-down of the modern Hollywood idiom — moving on from the televisual/early-Internet rabbit-hole of the Adult Swim show — ever made. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is, unequivocally, a masterpiece. If you think The Blues Brothers is hilarious you're an idiot.

4. Damsels in Distress by Whit Stillman

I think this might be a 2011 film, but I only got to see it in theaters this year (I went a few times) and, for me, it's another masterpiece — and the greatest Stillman film. A lot of friends of mine who've seen it either hate it or are on the fence. I would say that I love the way ideas, notional flights-of-fancy, and rhetorical turns of phrases are taken in Damsels in Distress to their extremity, their utmost conclusion — and in so doing a kind of conversational utopia is asserted in which at least one of the conversants do not just 'drop the subject' because it's hit a baton-pass lull but instead take it to the end-iteration of whatever point needs to be made. (e.g.,: the "Xavier/Zavier" monologue.) Additionally, Stillman's mise-en-scène has never been more focused: he instills a clean, almost Hawksian grammatical clarity to his shots and cuts unlike little else seen in modern movies. (e.g.,: the quick insert shot when Hugo Becker and Analeigh Tipton chop vegetables.) I could go on and would like to at some point — other highlights include the highly word-worked script à la Stillman (I read someone who wrote something to the effect: "It is so refreshing to hear characters who speak in complete sentences," and I agree to a certain extent but this doesn't exactly get to what's good about the dialogue, and of course this was probably a veiled dig at mumblecore), and the boarding-school milieu. Easily one of my favorite films of all-time, and one that gets better and richer with every viewing, like most movies do.

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TOP THREE / NO RANKING

Louie: Season 3 by Louis C.K.

The greatest single season of 'episodic television' (and one which is actually TRUE CINEMA, at that) in the history of the medium — better than the final season of The Larry Sanders Show, than the phantasmagoria of the end of Roseanne, than the most recent season (the "New York" one) of Curb Your Enthusiasm, than the British Office, than Peep Show (shout-out Hannah Fidell), than Get a Life, than the best of (and especially the last episode of) The Sopranos. And better than "Wrist Hulk." (Which, for all I know, he may have written.) So much has been written about Louis C.K. at this late stage that I'll only jot three things. (1) Season 3 is the funniest, most humane, absurd, tears-inducing whatever-it-even-was-from-one-week-to-the-next scalp-grasping WHAT since the first Gatti/Ward fight. (2) The DP of Pootie Tang was Willy Kurant who shot Godard's Masculin Féminin, Pialat's Sous le soleil de Satan, and, most recently, Garrel's A Burning Hot Summer. (3) The ad absurdum conceit of guest-star-appearances on this season wiped away the cliché of gratuitous drop-ins by dint of the sheer jaw-dropping quality of the performances: Gaby Hoffmann, Melissa Leo, Parker Posey, Maria Dizzia, Sarah Silverman, Chloë Sevigny, etc. (and the surprise-guest-spot turn of the Master in the 3-episode Late Show arc). Literally, the best, and without a "thing that I saw this year counting almost every movie" qualifier. The best. And this on the heels of the Live at the Beacon Theater web-on-demand-$5-download special at the end of last year, which is the best stand-up set I've ever seen. How is all of this possible? Nothing is more fucking annoying.

Open Five 2 by Kentucker Audley

"The Sort-Of Sequel to Open Five." A few things here: this film along with Stephen Gurewitz's Marvin Seth and Stanely and a couple other pictures like ones by Amy Seimetz and Dustin Guy Defa (neither of which I've seen yet) premiered at La Di Da in NYC in September; Open Five 2 has played at two other places since, once in Memphis, and once in Wrocław. Right now, the film is available to watch for free, streaming, in HD, indefinitely, at NoBudge, which is also where Marvin Seth and Stanley was watchable for a bit. (You can check out the OF2 trailer, one of the most exhilarating ever cut, in my opinion, along with an hour-long archived/YouTubed Ustream Q&A with the director-star which is worth your time where among other things he gives the sharpest response about why 'older people' haven't been in his films to date, although they actually have.) — Part of me dislikes the term "mumblecore" but most of me no longer cares and thinks it's okay and kind of charming and it's okay, again. Most of the mumblecorers, so to speak, have proven themselves as lasters and still-further-going expeditioneers. To that point, and this is just my opinion, Open Five 2 is the best movie anyone who ever got lumped into the category has ever made — and I love a lot of those films. I never much took to using the categorization to begin with, because to me movies are movies. (And why, on this list, are there so many American movies? This might be the first year ever with as much for me, and so maybe there are some things filmmakers need to have a long hard self-exam about, and which festival magazines are oblivious to though maybe the French are now more aware beyond just the Safdies and Alex Ross Perry.) (Separately: Cinema-allusion and plan-séquence and waiting-for-government-funding are dead.) So what's in Open Five 2? A film broken up into two halves, where the first is another road trip (like in two other films on this list), intermittently so, and which provides the opportunity for one of the most cogent and powerful/breathtaking take-downs I've ever seen on screen, via Kentucker, having to do with annual-income and frustration and general annoyance at a certain disposition or confrontation, — and which also provides the opportunity for an articulation, via Jake Rabinbach, of love and the way people operating in relationships actually operate, while he's steering the vehicle, and which, alone, friends of mine and me had a long conversation about in a BBQ joint after the La Di Da showing. The first half of the picture is exciting exactly because it's kind of meandering, and sort of a knowing (and slippery) retread of "established" templates (road trip, certain ways of cuts looking and talking), etc., interspersed with the electrifying moments, the beautiful images, snow at last. The second half: — I said this once before about the first Open Five film, but: this movie is another record, in every sense: there is a 'Side 2' here definitely, and there's a flip-point where the movie doubles-down. A new rhythm comes on around the 40- or 45-minute mark after Kentucker returns to Memphis, gets back in the vicinity of Caroline (Caroline White, also in Karpovsky's Red Flag, cf. above); they make a go of reconnecting after some fraught recent times. I won't say much from this stretch of the movie, beyond the fact that in the overwhelming climax of the film White and Audley, together, make the case by admission that whatever the future might hold, at least here, there in the scene, there is love, not movie-character love but the raw flay and exposure: — and here in a time when everything looks cheap and stupid and facile or abstract in most movies: finally something alive, something moving, a plea to try to live our lives better, — this, in one of the most beautiful-looking films of recent times, and I love it because the core surpasses its own (excellent) image/sound aesthetics. ( — ...that is, someone might for example make a film about "turning 40" and it's somehow never about 'turning 40' it's about 'performativity' or is somehow ultimately a subtext because that somehow trumps the subject 'in critical aesthetics.') In an epoch when I hate when movie reviewers or their staff-editors often repurpose a past-/pop-culturally-relevant movie title, or quibble on the thing, for their headline, — in this instance it would certainly occasion — and without much Godfather: Part III operatics — "ONE FROM THE HEART."

Like Someone in Love by Abbas Kiarostami

One of the greatest filmmakers of all-time. One of his greatest films. (He's only ever made masterpieces.) The title is completely presented in English, on the digital negative (just like the titles of the Dinah, Ella, and Björk recordings, all of which the director loves; at first he was going to call the film The End, as in the title-card you see at the end of studio-era Hollywood movies). The film was shot in Tokyo. In a sense, Like Someone in Love represents a companion-piece to Certified Copy. A colleague told me that that particular film (another of the greatest of the 2010s, something on the level of Buñuel's best) was no good because he couldn't stand Binoche's "schtick." (A "schtick" that repulsed him from one movie of hers to the next, apparently.) This sentiment of his reminded me of the Truffaut film The Man Who Loved Women, which I've never seen, because this man must not understand what there is to love about women. Anyway, there is no way to retread Kiarostami's film on this blog entry: I simply wouldn't want to give away spoilers — I'm not a child, but people see films to be surprised, to experience the pleasure of surprise: this is how it works, and I agree wholeheartedly that it should be this way. So: most people reading this have probably read a little bit about the picture and already know about its general contour: okay: the first scene is a tour-de-force of sound and looking and discerning; there's a cab-ride afterwards which is shocking in its power and surprise; an apartment scene with suspense, palm-and-reveal (Kiarostami, the anti-Italian-magic-realist magician); a utilitarian afternoon scene, daylight but claustrophobic and also car-based, a rather protracted scene slightly boring the first time around (I was at MoMA btw on the first day they opened the theater in the new building in 2004: to see Godard's Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du cinéma on 35mm and, earlier, Kiarostami's Five for the introduction of which he had sent a fax read aloud by Mary Lea Bandy, in which he asserted to the audience it was perfectly okay to fall asleep during the course of his film); and a final section which I will not talk about here, because it's the dazzling, dazing ending of this great work, — and is one of the most shocking endings in the history of movies. I have not stopped thinking about this challenging, rapturous movie for months, and maybe never will, maybe never will understand its puzzles completely. But this is part of the exchange with "Kiarostami, the magnificent."

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Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Mark Tween


I made a short film called Mark Tween, starring Tallie Medel. Click here or on the poster image to watch it at its Vimeo page. Enjoy.


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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The Unspeakable Act

A couple weeks ago The Notebook posted a long interview I did with Dan Sallitt about his incredible new film The Unspeakable Act, starring Tallie Medel. The piece is here.


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Administrative Note: Part of the more recent downturn on activity here has to do with the fact that I hate Blogspot's/Blogger's updated posting interface. Not that I was too crazy about it to begin with. Further, I've been unable to add the latest posts to the makeshift index you see at the left; a limit of the number of entries allowed has been imposed at Blogger's backend. Any post more recent than that Tempest thing has been prohibited from entering the 'table of contents', and henceforth will be findable only via Google or manual wading beyond the current homepage. No good.
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Monday, May 21, 2012

Like Someone in Love

Pieces
Kiarostami
Kiarostami | [ Ozu ] | Hou
doublings
reflections
shared / transferred predicaments, scenarios, events
"translations"
interruptions
favors
"evolution"
dislocated voices
bi-fold psychology
the Sleep of the Just (in every sense of the phrase)
MALEDICTION
In CERTIFIED COPY, reality mutates; the same can be said of LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, but it no longer means the same thing. In CERTIFIED COPY, reality inside of metaphor; in LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, metaphor from the reality.
21.05.12

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

High School




I wrote a piece about Frederick Wiseman's 1968 film High School at The MUBI Notebook. Here.

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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Friday, March 23, 2012

The YouTube Videos of ColinMan1991, AubreyS1987, and MathewV21688


Opening To Pocahontas 1996 VHS



ColinMan1991 Game Recap #20 February 3, 2012



1-Year Anniversary Special For AubreyS1987 (Part 7)



1-Year Anniversary Special For AubreyS1987 (Part 8)



AubreyS1987 Weekend Celebration #1 (Part 1)



3 Different Versions of "Lady and the Tramp"



10-in-1 Video Special (Part 7)



Birthday Special for MathewV21688 (Part 24) The Epic Finale!



MathewV21688 2011 Spring Break Special Part 13



Announcement of 2012 Spring Break Special



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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The Tempest


[1611]





I.ii


PROSPERO

The hour's now come; / The very minute bids thee ope thine ear. / Obey, and be attentive. Canst thou remember / A time before we came unto this cell? / I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not / Out three years old.

MIRANDA

Certainly, sir, I can.

PROSPERO

By what? By any other house or person? / Of anything the image tell me that / Hath kept with thy remembrance.

MIRANDA

'Tis far off, / And rather like a dream than an assurance / That my remembrance warrants. Had I not / Four or five women once that tended me?

PROSPERO

Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it / That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?

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I.ii


PROSPERO

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea sorrow. / Here in this island we arrived; and here / Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit / Than other princess' can, that have more time / For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.

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I.ii


ARIEL

All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come / To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curled clouds. To thy strong bidding task / Ariel and all his quality.

PROSPERO

Hath thou, spirit, / Performed, to point, the tempest that I bade thee?

ARIEL

To every article. / I boarded the King's ship. Now on the beak, / Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, / I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide / And burn in many places; on the topmast, / The yards, and boresprit would I flame distinctly, / Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors / O' th' dreadful thunderclaps, more momentary / And sight-outrunning were not. The fire and cracks / Of sulfurous roaring the most mighty Neptune / Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble; / Yea, his dread trident shake.

PROSPERO

My brave spirit! / Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil / Would not infect his reason?

ARIEL

Not a soul / But felt a fever of the mad and played / Some tricks of desperation.

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I.ii


PROSPERO

Dost thou forget / From what a torment I did free thee?

ARIEL

No.

PROSPERO

Thou dost; and think'st it much to tread the ooze / Of the salt deep, / To run upon the sharp wind of the North, / To do me business in the veins o' th' earth / When it is baked with frost.

ARIEL

I do not, sir.

PROSPERO

Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot / The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy / Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her?

ARIEL

No, sir.

PROSPERO

Thou hast. Where was she born? Speak! / Tell me!

ARIEL

Sir, in Argier.

PROSPERO

O, was she so? I must / Once in a month recount what thou hast been, / Which thou forget'st. This damned witch Sycorax, / For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing, from Argier, / Thou know'st, was banished. For one thing she did / They would not take her life. Is not this true?

ARIEL

Ay, sir.

PROSPERO

This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child / And here was left by th' sailors. Thou, my slave, / As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant. / And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorred commands, / Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, / By help of her more potent ministers, / And in her most unmitigable rage, / Into a cloven pine; within which rift / Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain / A dozen years; within which space she died / And left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groans / As fast as millwheels strike. Then was this island / (Save for the son that she did litter here, / A freckled whelp, hagborn) not honoured with / A human shape.

ARIEL

Yes, Caliban her son.

PROSPERO

Dull thing, I say so! He, that Caliban / Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know'st / What torment I did find thee in; thy groans / Did make wolves howl and penetrate the breasts / Of ever-angry bears. It was a torment / To lay upon the damned, which Sycorax / Could not again undo. It was mine art, / When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape / The pine, and let thee out.

ARIEL

I thank thee, master.

PROSPERO

If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak / And peg thee in his knotty entrails till / Thou hast howled away twelve winters.

ARIEL

Pardon, master. / I will be correspondent to command / And do my spiriting gently.

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I.ii


CALIBAN

As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed / With raven's feather from unwholesome fen / Drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye / And blister you all o'er!

PROSPERO

For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps, / Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins / Shall, for that vast of night that they may work, / All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging / Than bees that made 'em.

CALIBAN

I must eat my dinner. / This island's mine by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first, / Thou strok'st me and made much of me; wouldst give me / Water with berries in't; and teach me how / To name the bigger light, and how the less, / That burn by day and night.

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I.ii


[Ariel's song]

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
[Burden.] Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them — ding-dong bell.

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II.ii


CALIBAN

All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him / By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me, / And yet I needs must curse. But they'll nor pinch, / Fright me with urchin shows, pitch me i' th' mire, / Nor lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark / Out of my way, unless he bid 'em. But / For every trifle are they set upon me; / Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me, / And after bite me; then like hedgehogs which / Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount / Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I / All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues / Do hiss me into madness.

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II.ii


STEPHANO

How now, mooncalf? How does thine ague?

CALIBAN

Hast thou not dropped from heaven?

STEPHANO

Out o' th' moon, I do assure thee. I was the Man i' th' Moon when time was.

CALIBAN

I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee. My mistress showed me thee, and thy dog, and thy bush.

STEPHANO

Come, swear to that; kiss the book. [Gives him drink.] I will furnish it anon with new contents. Swear. [Caliban drinks.]

TRINCULO

By this good light, this is a very shallow monster! I afeard of him? A very weak monster! The Man i' th' Moon? A most poor credulous monster! Well drawn, monster, in good sooth!

CALIBAN

I'll show thee every fertile inch o' th' island; and I will kiss thy foot. I prithee, be my god.

TRINCULO

By this light, a most perfidious and drunken monster! When's god's asleep, he'll rob his bottle.

CALIBAN

I'll kiss thy foot. I'll swear myself thy subject.

STEPHANO

Come on then. Down, and swear!

TRINCULO

I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster. A most scurvy monster! I could find in my heart to beat him —

STEPHANO

Come, kiss.

TRINCULO

But that the poor monster's in drink. An abominable monster!

CALIBAN

I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries; / I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough. / A plague upon the tyrant that I serve! / I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee, / Thou wondrous man.

TRINCULO

A most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard!

CALIBAN

I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; / And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts, / Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how / To snare the nimble marmoset. I'll bring thee / To clust'ring filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee / Young scamels from the rock.

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III.ii


STEPHANO

Flout 'em and scout 'em
And scout 'em and flout 'em!
Thought is free.

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III.iii


GONZALO

By'r Lakin, I can go no further, sir; / My old bones aches. Here's a maze trod indeed / Through forthrights and meanders.

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IV.i


PROSPERO

You do look, my son, in a movèd sort, / As if you were dismayed; be cheerful, sir. / Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air; / And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.

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V.i


PROSPERO

Now does my project gather to a head. / My charms crack not, my spirits obey, and time / Goes upright with his carriage.

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V.i


PROSPERO

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, / And ye that on the sands with printless foot / Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him / When he comes back; you demi-puppets that / By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, / Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime / Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoice / To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid / (Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimmed / The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, / And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault / Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder / Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak / With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory / Have I made shake and by the spurs plucked up / The pine and cedar; graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth / By my so potent art. But this rough magic / I here abjure; and when I have required / Some heavenly music (which even now I do) / To work mine end upon their senses that / This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book.

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Sunday, January 29, 2012

Jean-Luc Godard, On Authors' Rights (2012)




(Click the full-screen icon on the video to view large.)

Via Kassandre, a not-for-profit organization that aims to promote and support a free and open cinema. Discovered this weekend on the Twitter for Les Films du Losange.

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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Bob Dylan Interview with John Elderfield, 2012: In the Films of the '40s and '50s, "Individuals Overcame Problems Instead of Merely Surviving Them"


ELDERFIELD: An area of American visual art of great interest to you is, I know, movies of the 1950s, such as A Face in the Crowd, Ace in the Hole, and Sweet Smell of Success. What is it about these that attract you? And do you see a relationship between them and the kind of narrative dramas you have painted — more in The Brazil Series, though, than in The Asia Series?

DYLAN: Face in the Crowd — that's so current, isn't it? You can watch any of those TV personalities, and if you've seen Face in the Crowd, you know there's probably some Lonesome Rhodes in all of them. The whole country is like their flock of sheep. I grew up in a small town hidden from the outside world, and the films from the '40s and '50s were like a window into the future, like classic literature, and had great meaning. It's hard to explain that, especially in this age of narcissism and self-surveillance. A lot of people wouldn't know they are alive unless they have photos of themselves to prove it — from the cradle to the grave, actually. The movies that we grew up watching seemed to be tuned to a higher vibration. They weren't about us, they were about people bigger than us, living more on the edge than us — strange morality tales, more like Greek theater. Individuals overcame problems instead of merely surviving them, so you knew you could do that too. The people we saw on the screen were more real than real people. They were exemplary. Cult figures. Heroes and heroines. Anti-heroes. Top of the world. Brute force. Themes of salvation. Echoes of Shakespeare and of Aeschylus. Those films had a powerful effect on all of us who grew up with them. Like schoolboy lessons. Sure, I see a relationship. There's always been a relationship.

—from a new interview with John Elderfield, here

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Monday, January 16, 2012

Marriage Material + Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011


Watch in Full and for Free


Marriage Material by Joe Swanberg, 2012:



Today Joe Swanberg premiered his latest and never-before-seen 55-minute feature, Marriage Material, at Vimeo, where it's available for viewing until the end of the month. It comes on the occasion of the release by Factory 25 of the Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 box set, the first installment of which bows this week, and which will ultimately be comprised of the collectively amazing Silver Bullets, Art History, The Zone, and the still-unpremiered Privacy Settings. I haven't seen Privacy Settings yet, but I personally consider both Art History and The Zone, alongside the 2009 Alexander the Last, as maybe Swanberg's very best films to date. Joe gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times blog a few days ago about the newest film and the box set here. You can order Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 here.

About Marriage Material: pic stars Kentucker Audley and Caroline White as they babysit Joe and Kris's son Jude Huckleberry Swanberg over the course of a day or two at their Memphis home. The presence of the baby occasions a hard look at the possibility of starting a family and a serious conversation about when/if/why to get married. Tensions boil, but never boil over, via such touchstones as diverse and oblique as government aid, Béla Tarr, and Mac vs. PC. The long central conversation between Kentucker and Caroline that takes place on the couple's bed with the family dog at their feet qualifies as one of the most intimate and powerful scenes Swanberg has presented to date. The entire film (beautiful, as these frames attest to, with Adam Wingard as DP) sort of represents a kind of prologue, epilogue, or companion-piece to Audley's own forthcoming — and unbelievable — Open Five 2, which should well be regarded as one of the most anticipated films of 2012.

You can watch Marriage Material right now, right here. Go full-screen, and plug in your earbuds.

Marriage Material by Joe Swanberg, 2012:





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Posts on Silver Bullets and Art History at Cinemasparagus:

Silver Bullets [2011]

Art History [2011]


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Sunday, January 08, 2012

Scattered Junk


What's in a Name?


Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:



They say you bring what you know to a movie. Holds for the filmmaker, holds for the audience. If you didn't take the picture as a kind of documentary, you might proclaim Scattered Junk, in your sick little poll, winner of Best Production Design of any film of 2011. But the revolution is not a craft-service table, and Scattered Junk is the true document of real revolutionaries: this cell of dreamers, plotters, enact the same gestures of Carlos, transposed to an apartment not so much lived-in as occupied, embedded-within, just beneath the apex of a clapboard that recalls a similar form similarly haunted, halfway through The Night of the Hunter. Too real? Or just too earnest for a world (or movie landscape) where all is statecraft and lies?

Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:



Everyone will be cruel to this film — let's have no illusions that the critics are anything other than animals. The title of the picture applies to settings — to a final mixtape by subject Tim Cushing — to fragile emotions of fragile moments — to the approach by director Timothy Morton which might be characterized as junkle-rough, its thick-stitched and very kinetic patchwork the jigsaw signature of some second-, third-cousin to Trash Humpers, Gummo, or the recent films by HK's pal Jonas Mekas. Scattered Junk defies the viewer (it doesn't matter what his 'class' is or where she lays her regional roots) to reckon the whole affair sad, to deem the self-constructed squalor, the morning misery windshields, the implied prospectlessness, the suicide absent and central to the matters at hand, as all so sad. And this Whole is sad, and Morton celebrates its beauty accordingly with just about as little use for patronizing-"sad" as one might any slice of time.

Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:



Aside from his talents as a filmmaker, Timothy Morton is one of the most interesting actors/personalities in movies today: see his notable appearances in Kentucker Audley's Team Picture, Ginger Sand, Family Tree (playing Lena Dunham's brother), or the great Holy Land. You can watch Scattered Junk in its entirety on your laptop, desktop, iPad, or phone for free at Audley's excellent No Budge site here. (Just be good and watch in full-screen mode if you can, and plug in some headphones.)

Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:



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Other pieces at Cinemasparagus about films involving Timothy Morton:

Team Picture

Ginger Sand

Family Tree

Holy Land


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