Change Your Image
fullfemale
Reviews
No Quarto da Vanda (2000)
Exploitation
Other viewers are apparently moved by what they see on the screen- a tale of social and moral decay, and a call to our sympathies and outrage. The film doesn't appeal to me in that way, because I can't help but be aware of the filmmaker, whose presence looms over everything and who is the real character of the film. What's he's done is gone into a poetically haunting and inherently tragic environment and attempted to "capture" it. In this sense the film is closer to photography than to a film, although it retains a sort of loose narrative. The fact that we do look down on these people and make moral judgments about them is what make the film exploitative. Costa takes the most disenfranchised, powerless people with no will to live and makes a career and critical fame from it, while the drug addicts in the film stay where they are, which is hopeless and dying, and then we get to hear from him when he screens the film that many did die. In this sense it's almost a SNUFF film.
Of course we are going to feel something about that, especially when it is all beautifully lit and framed to look like a painting. Costa claims to admire John Ford. Well, John Ford was making myths, and so is Costa. I just question the sort of myth-making he is engaging in, and the moral implications of it. He gets to sit around and live with these people who are dying, capture them aesthetically with his camera, get them to work and learn lines and repeat their own dialogues for camera takes without pay, and then takes these voyeuristic images and shows them to a privileged middle-class Western audience to admire at film festivals,so they can "feel a little something."
If he had used actors I would feel differently, but then the film would have a totally different quality. Actors are paid to be used like props and furniture, and actors are not usually captured in the state of dying.
Mies vailla menneisyyttä (2002)
Awful
This movie is just plain awful. There's simply nothing to grasp onto, intellectually, emotionally, or thematically. Some people say they like to "fill in" the meaning of who the characters are and what the film is about, but I think that's hard to do when you're given so little. It's a film constructed as a product of the new Cult of Mediocrity, with its virtuousness being aligned with its absence or lack of things rather than the particular presence of anything. Mediocrity has become a kind of religion in which its priests hold a position of moral superiority against anyone who insists that there is such a thing as individual greatness. Yet anyone who practices this religion is a hypocrite, as it is impossible to go through life without assigning value to things and without admiring products of individual human spirit, even if one isn't conscious of doing so. The intentional blankness of this film delights people today who are offended by the "imposition" of the ideas of an author, the craft of a director or an editor, the skills of an actor, or indeed by the offensive crime of making a good film. A bad film flatters people, as do characters who are inferior to them. But this film is universally loved because the bitter pill of politically correct drab festival fare has been lightened up by a rock and roll number here and a flat joke there. So it's a sort of repressed burlesquing of the festival film, almost a joke about festival films designed to amuse cranky jurors and audiences, and in my view nothing more than a clever balancing act.
In the hyper-political film festival world, art has been replaced by politically correct self-effacement. At least a third of the comments here are by people who compare this film favorably to Blockbuster Hollywood films. Their comments reveal that they want to show that they "get it," that they know how to eschew entertainment for political correctness, that they are not like the Philistines out there who expect a movie to have a plot and characters and a point. The fact is that there are really good films out there that are not formula films with linear plots, but that do have a spiritual or intellectual or emotional center, are rigorous, and are ABOUT something. And there are also films with great artistic value that DO contain linear plots and characters. If anything this film is SIMILAR to Blockbuster Hollywood films, in its absence of meaningful motifs and its imposition of social and moral conformism.
Waking Dreams (2007)
Feel-Good Formula Movie
This film is about an Indian girl, Latha, living in Texas who decides to "live her dream" instead of following the path her parents would wish her to follow. The text is riddled with talk about dreams: the main character "daydreams" in scenes from Bollywood movies; her contribution to a video game design is about a character who falls into quicksand and finds a dreamworld; her parents want her to become a doctor, but she wants to "live her dream" and be a game designer; her mother and father regret not having followed their own dreams before it was too late; Latha explains to her colleague, after showing him a clip from a Bollywood movie, that she likes the fantasy dream world that these movies create.
If this sounds heavy-handed and maudlin, it is. The world of India is portrayed as being more colorful and magical than the American world. But the film uses American film techniques which are so unimaginative and inartistic and mediocre as to make me think that whereas India itself may contain interesting people, the differences are merely superficial. For this film merely shows us that Indian people can be just as boring and tedious as the rest of us.
So whereas this film is very ambitious and technically accomplished, it's full of clichés and is at all turns unsurprising and banal. And while it's slick enough to get television distribution (partly due to the generic feel-good musical choices made by industry insiders who worked on the score) I felt when watching it that slickness was most of what it had to offer. To its credit, this film was shot on a low budget and outside of the studio system, and yet it has the virtues (and vices) of films shot with a great deal more money and personnel. Its theme, that one must follow one's dreams, is a theme that's played out with so little subtlety as to make it seem almost like a children's film, or worse, like an advertisement. The best thing about it is that it features characters who originate from South India. It's wonderful to see accomplished Indian actors performing in lead roles. And yet what they're given to do is so generic, so hopelessly lacking in imagination, and so regurgitated from bad commercial films and television, that all I could do was watch in some sort of despair. The white characters, too, were dismally unidimensional, acting only as evil foils to the Indian characters' desires in an attempt to create race conflict which was only as complex as the most simpleminded revenge or teen picture.
Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticize this film, as I do think the director has talent in terms of the requirements of the film industry. And as someone who despises mainstream movies in general, I'm probably not a good judge of this picture's charms. But I would wish that someone outside of the studio system would have the guts and imagination to give us something different than the most generic Hollywood fare, especially when it's made by someone with the rich cultural heritage that this film introduces us to. Some visual choices in the bright, beautiful saris that the women in the family wear to a family celebration, or in the Bollywood fantasy sequences, were the only parts of the film that felt true and fully realized.
So while the film seems to tell us that one should follow one's dreams, it simultaneously tells us that one should follow a generic, paint-by-numbers formula when expressing oneself in an artistic medium, either for fear of creating waves, or because acceptance in the film industry and making money is your dream. In my view this is depressing because I feel that a strong need for acceptance in an industry really comes from a kind of fear, and not from strength. And in the end there is another kind of despair that comes out (perhaps inadvertently), in the suggestion that it's not the dreams you follow in life that really matter, but the dreams you follow in your head, which no one can see.
So the film is really a tragedy in a deep psychological sense. And I think that if the director had more interesting film references to draw on, some of these themes may have come out. But sadly, we live in a world in which the mainstream material that artists have to draw on is itself so worthless as to ruin the creativity of the most enterprising young brains in film schools all over the country, and to ruin film structure and narrative for all the rest. What American independents create is so often either feel-good formula narrative or structureless, feel-bad anti-narrative. And in the end, if what people make is only generic or reactionary, Hollywood wins and art loses.
Pervert! (2005)
Not like Russ Meyer
There were all types of sexploitation films, and they had many different underlying themes and aims. Russ Meyer's aim seemed to be to glorify the female as a fully voluptuous, fully powerful, and fully remarkable creature. The female to Meyer is "more" than the male. The sheer joy he takes in her physicality proves this, plus her mythic strength and power over the male. This movie, PERVERT, is exactly the opposite. The women are completely subordinate to the men. Their sexuality is seen from the outside, and has no real power. The women are viciously slaughtered. Even the gooniest, most degenerate, oldest, or stupidest males are stronger and smarter than the females. This is cheap sex comedy a hundred times removed from adult sexual issues. The attitude towards the women is like that of teen males who hate women because the sexiest women aren't available to them, and because a woman's sexuality is totally abstract to them. It's actually quite Victorian in that sense. It's full of a type of fear and curiosity of the female that emerges in times of great repression. SPOILER ALERT: Worse still, the "killer" that is terrorizing the females (the detached penis of the protagonist), is never related psychologically to its owner, so that an opportunity for discussing male violence or a split between the civilized and savage parts of male desire, is missed. Indeed, the claymation penis is the only character that is given a personality. It has rage, humility, bashfulness, shame, makes cutesy faces, etc. This is all of course a cheap joke. Especially as this killer penis rapes women, destroys their insides, and comes out through their mouths, behaving like a knife, eviscerating them and making them explode with blood, then scuttles across the desert like a cowboy hero out for revenge. Ha ha. Other jokes draw on racism, homophobia, ageism, etc. As an attempt to make fun of redneck values it doesn't work, as the film doesn't offer an alternate point of view, so it seems to condone the values it's sending up. Therefore, as satire it fails miserably. The filmmakers seem to revel in the bad values, almost nostalgic for them, and to be making this film as a way of re-entrenching them through humor. As a female, I find as much humor in this travesty as a black person might find in a comic send-up of a KKK lynching, all of course from the point of view of the racists. Humor is always based on the audience sharing values with the jokes being made, and so all of the people loving this film might want to take a look at themselves and why they think it's funny.