Which leads me to ask, who do you think is better? Bardot or Deneuve?
Both blondes with brown eyes. Personally, I choose Deneuve. And who do you think has aged better? Deneuve or Bardot? Again, I choose the same. Though I like Bardot for what she called Sarah Palin.
Filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer once opined about mood defining a story. He stated: ‘Imagine we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered: everything in it has taken on another level; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed.…This is the effect I want to get.’ Alfred Hitchcock used this ploy in one of his best films, Rope, whose entirety is sort of an inverse of this film’s first 55 minutes, while Kurosawa follows a parallel track in regards to character. What changes in the scene on the train is not a willful manipulation of a character, by a screenwriter, but an organic and believable flowering into character, due to circumstances that are not contrived. Instead of knowing of a corpse behind the door, the audience’s first hour has let us become that corpse- or thing, with knowledge of itself. In essence, we know what Gondo will do because his character has been so skillfully revealed, despite many seeming moments that paint him as something other than his true self. That the remainder of the film shows a more complacent Gondo (check out the scene where he whistles as he mows his own lawn) is, thus, not in the least implausible, for it is the logical outcome of all that has gone before.
The film does a wonderful job of showing the utter corruption that is inevitable with the eternal corporate mindset that slacks off public responsibility for mere profit, and the particularly Japanese obsession with falling on the sword, so to speak, for one’s superiors. Wada says, ‘You don’t understand bureaucrats. A good official never implicates a superior, no matter what the cost.’ He later tells Nishi, ‘You’re up against a terrifying system that will never yield,’ to which Nishi replies, ‘Everyone feels that way and gives up. That’s how they get away with it.’ But, ultimately, it is the long kowed Wada who is correct. The saddest thing is the corruption this film details is so minor league today that it seems almost childish compared to Enron, Worldcom, and the many others in the years since. In a sense, Iwabuchi isn’t even the top criminal in the film. That would belong to the corporation’s little seen President, Arimura (Ken Mitsuda), who, late in the film, when things seem to be going against the corporation, even sends over a vial of poison for Iwabuchi to do himself in, in case things don’t go well. Ever the corporate toady, Iwabuchi nor only thanks his superior for the vial, but for even telling him the correct dosage needed for death. Watching this film, far more than any of the period pieces put out, explains exactly how the militarists that arose in the early Twentieth Century were so easily able to lead their country down the path to near oblivion.
1) Claimed abstraction in art is rarely, if ever, abstract. Why? Because there simply and rationally can be no such thing as non-narrative nor non-representational art. Yes, you read that correctly. A smear of orange color is a smear of orange color, and can represent a smear of orange color. That smear, or dot on a piece of paper, also has a narrative, and that narrative is, ‘smear/dot on a canvas.’ Yes, that is a narrative, but its utter banality and bereftness points out just how creatively barren a work with such a paltry narrative is. Imagine the mind that could create, or be fascinated by, such an inane display of so-called skill and talent, and such a ridiculous narrative thread. It might take a few seconds to craft, but only a few thousandths of a second to grasp. Art is a form of communication, but a higher form of communication than mere language, therefore the skill in which the communication is laid out is essential to its determination of excellence. Art is a verb, the how an idea is communicated; not the idea (the noun) itself.
2) One can, as do many of Marla’s buyers, imbue anything one wants into the painting/artwork, but while great art constructs no, or few, boundaries, what it can do is give linkage to imbue, a bit, of non-obvious things into itself; but NOT the whole thing. If the whole thing can be imbued there is no reason to work at art- the whole rationale behind found art. This displaces the creative impulse from mostly on the artist, and slightly on the percipient, to being 100% on the percipient. So, if the percipient of the claimed artwork is doing all the creative heavy lifting with imbuement, what exactly is left for the so-called artist to do? This folly, naturally, sunders art from the realms of skill and craft. Art that works on multiple levels of interpretation is usually a deeper and more profound thing. Claimed art that has infinite levels of interpretation is a scam, because, logically, if something means everything it means nothing.
3) Intent in art means nothing. One can claim they intended something, but so what, if it fails that claimed intent? Since there is no true way to know what an artist intended, it has no bearing on the art. What is left of the art is all that is required; that someone was going through a divorce at the time, had gall stones, was pro or con a certain political position, or was squabbling over a real estate transaction, might be interesting, but those facts are just as likely non-factors as factors. This false idea, of intent having stature in art, also allows for absurdities being propounded about certain art and artists- like Pollock’s drip paintings somehow representing the nuclear age because they somehow represented the whirl of the atomic shell.
4) If seen as a subset of intent, the art then becomes less about itself and more about the backstory; a further reduction of modern life into the disease of the celebritization of everything. As example, Jackson Pollock’s pre-drip paintings showed him to be a meager, callow, and highly imitative artist; but it was his heavily promoted tale of woe (alcoholism and failed love life) and ‘rebirth’ that made him a ‘star’ in the art world, not any real skill.
5) Finally, there is the plain old common sense notion that if something is claimed as art, that any layman can do with no effort or in little time (draw a dot in the center of a piece of paper, use a roller to paint a canvas one color, toss paint at a canvas and let the drips fall where they may), then it is simply not art. Now, this does not negate great photography nor cinematography, but I only mention these two art forms because folks often mistakenly claim both can be done with little effort and time; without realizing that most photographs, even by claimed Masters, simply do not rise to the level of art. It takes years of practice, and understanding the ‘impending moment,’ to make a truly great photo, or scene in a film, work. As mentioned earlier, simply contrast Marla’s painting sludgefests to the young violinist in the documentary stock footage- he shows skill, she does not; it’s really that simple. In fact, in the best moment of the film (and one he should have used as a template for the whole film) Bar-Lev torpedoes the hilarious claim that the DVD painting Marla did, to prove her abilities, is substantively no different from any of her other work, by showing side-by-side stills of the DVD painting and others; even as gullible patrons ooh and ah over it. One sees, also, that there is no logical coherence (and not even a Keatsian Negatively Capable coherence) between the titles of Marla’s paintings, and what is on the canvas. The names are immanently random and the paintings utterly generic messes.
Russian Ark (Russkiy Kovcheg) is one of those films more notable for the technical expertise it exhibits (or preens of) than any real artistic merit. It reminds one of Mike Figgis’s 2000 film Timecode, wherein that whole film was supposedly done in four separate single takes, in real time. That claim was debunked by a simple watching of the film, and the film itself was notable for being a screenplay disaster. The four stories, which occupied one fourth of the whole screen the whole time, had volume turned up on one section while the others were backgrounded, and then switched, which made it difficult for the viewer to even stick with whatever tale he preferred. Technically, the film was a mess, and, as there was no real story, just a gimmick, the film bombed critically and financially. Russian Ark, made in 2002 by the infamously somnolent director Alexander Sokurov, has a similar gimmick. While not following four separate stories, it is claimed to have been shot in one continuous take, directly onto a High Definition portable hard drive. It also claims that it was shot over one day, and in real time. While not a technical film expert, I did notice several scenes where the camera passed over black spots, making it the perfect place for an edit to occur, so I tend to believe that the claim of its 87 minute single Steadicam shot are overblown, if not outright false, even though the filmmakers have stated that the completed, unedited film, was done on a fourth attempt by cinematographer Tilman Büttner. It could very well just be a slicker version of Alfed Hitchcock’s more clumsy attempts in Rope.
I get it: we're in a shopping mall, and people are walking around like zombies, we're all consumers who don't think for ourselves, etc. Overall, I would not rank this with Carnival of Souls or even The Last Man on Earth, which I recently watched, and thought was much better than this.
The King of Comedy is probably the best film I’ve ever seen based upon a psychotic individual. Yes there is Scorsese’s earlier masterpiece, Taxi Driver, which also stars Robert De Niro as the obsessive and lonely Travis Bickle, but in The King of Comedy, De Niro’s character (Rupert Pupkin) is even more scary and delusional than Travis Bickle. For one thing, we’re not sure when he’s ever going to “snap,” and while Bickle seemingly goes after those he views as “corrupt,” Pupkin goes after anyone who gets in his way.
