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Reviews
The Brown Bunny (2003)
Super movie. Not for everyone.
I watched "The Brown Bunny" six weeks ago and I was surprised that I really liked it. I love movies with a slow and deliberate and meaningful pace and got that from this one. I loved the natural quality of the scenes combined with the very structured mis-en-scene that framed them. The style felt very European to me. In the end I found the story emotionally powerful and well delivered. I felt that the movie was a sincere portrait of someone haunted by their loneliness and guilt because of something terrible that happened to the person they loved. Then tonight I was watching the 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni film "The Passenger" and was totally loving it. And I was thinking that the movie's style reminded me in some ways of "The Brown Bunny". Then all of a sudden I saw the name Daisy show up and it struck me that the newer movie had made homage to the older! And then I thought about how both movie's protagonists were running from themselves and their reality and how flashbacks of dead characters showed up in the movie. And I thought about how in the Gallo movie that many of the shots were taken from the perspective of the passenger side seat of the van. I think Antonioni's film is more political than Gallo's and I like that about the older film, but the deeply painful edge behind the newer film makes it a great complement to the other. Excellent double feature material I think!
Cremaster 3 (2002)
cool art
I really enjoyed this film. I haven't seen much experimental cinema since school, so it was refreshing to experience something so creative again; it really does get the brain juices flowing.
'Cremaster 3' is difficult to describe because anything said about the details really ruins the pleasure of discovering them for yourself. But the exciting juxtaposition and sequence of seemingly isolated, but highly compelling and masterfully crafted images along with totally arcane and peculiar activities combine to create an effective alternative to an explicit plot. It's highly counter-narrative, I think, like Peter Greenaway films, but with a much slower cadence and more subtle melody. In a way, I felt like the length of the thing combined with the variance and control of the pace gave it a meditative quality that helped me absorb more meaning out of the show.
I love New York City and when I had the opportunity to see this on a recent visit there, the images in the film of familiar landmarks combined with the movie's spectacularly detailed tableaus were super evocative. So one of the big things I got out of the movie was a meditation on the nature of action, either creative (mostly here) or destructive, in combination with matter, in a state of either decay or functional form. These are timely themes and I thought that however abstract or oblique this movie might be to current events, it made me look at Manhattan in a refreshingly hopeful way.
I highly recommend seeing 'Cremaster 3' if you feel like experiencing something unusual and stimulating. Drink coffee; maybe take notes. Bring friends and talk about it after.
These may be some spoilers, like I said above it may ruin the pleasure of surprise discovery so don't read further if you appreciate that, but here a few delightful items you will encounter in this smart and freaky package of fun:
Gorgeous Aimee Mullins stuns in multiple roles, the Chrysler Building, the Guggenheim Museum, Agnostic Front, pretty bathing beauties, little white bear costumes, lots of goopy stuff, extraordinary prosthetics, dental torture, a leprechaun, legs, an ogre, a scary dirt woman, an elegant golden eagle, cool old cars in a demolition derby, a race of decaying horses, filling an elevator with liquid cement, Irish Masonic mobsters, Guinness kegs attacking their bartender and much much much much more.