Quite a day in Santa Fe.
We started the afternoon by heading to a new (to us) movie theater. The parking lot was confusing, but once inside we were greeted by a nice woman who might own the place. We bought some popcorn (she gave us a discount because she’s friendly) and went to find seats. Rather than theater or airplane seats this theater has couches. The room is terraced and each terrace has a couple of couches, each with its own coffee table. It gives the whole place an informal, homey feel that really works for a theater that shows pretty exclusively films I’ve never heard of. Beyond indie and into the obscure.
We were at the theater to see what claims to be the first and only feature film shot entirely with with a Navajo cast, by Navajos, on a Navajo reservation. It was shot on mini-dv with what were obviously non-actors. It’s called Mile Post 398 The story is about a man wrestling with an alcoholism that’s tearing his family apart. He’s torn between supporting his family and sticking with his childhood friends. The plot is simple and at times almost sentimental, but the emotions are complex and heartbreaking. There aren’t any easy answers.
The story is interesting on its own, but what makes the film truly compelling is all about the context. We live in a country that all but exterminated the native population and pushed the rest of them onto isolated chunks of land. There’s a whole population that the average American has no interaction with and knows very little about. I live in a state with one of the highest Native American populations. To get to civilization I have to drive through no fewer than three reservations (called pueblos around these parts), and yet even I almost never interact with natives unless they’re selling jewelry in The Square. We all know the stereotypes, but to see these folks tell their own story is completely different. It was startling to see the matter-of-factness with which they dealt with alcoholism within the Navajo community. The disease is just a part of the tapestry. Alcoholics don’t appear to be the rule, but they no one is surprised by them. The disease touches everyone’s lives. AA is mocked. In the end the main character makes a change for his family and through the inspiration of a father figure that he never had. His friends learn to accept his decision, but there’s no expectation that they will change. The three of them will have to try and do something other than get drunk around a fire.
The lack of professional actors is a mixed bag. There are some almost painful moments of people trying to deliver their lines, but there are also some brilliant scenes and actors. The dialogue is sometimes delivered pitch perfect, with actors actually sounding like people. All do respect to the great actors of the world, but they never actually sound like people. Here folks stumble over lines and are being forced to improvise just to survive. I don’t this film is coming to a theater near you, but if it does, I highly recommend you check it out.
After Mile we went to lunch a a place called The Cowgirl. The Cowgirl is sort of a touristy spot in Santa Fe, but I’d never been there. I should have gotten the barbecue, but instead I broke with my vegetarian diet to have a game burger. It’s a burger made of venison, buffalo, and elk. It wasn’t very interesting. We spent the first part of the meal looking at the photos of cowgirls that line the walls. In an unfortunate bit of kitsch all of the staff wear bad cowboy hats. The second half of the meal was spent making fun of a pair of fellow diners.
The girl was a pretty fifteen year-old. Her boyfriend was a skinny white guy wearing a very silly hat and baggy pants. We thought it was a funny pairing, but it was when he stood up and donned his jacket that things got memorable. The jacket was a black cotton number that went to his jeans. It was decorated with neon green and yellow lines that might or might not have been trucks. The piece was topped off by an enormous hood, which unfortunately covered his hat. We left shortly after they left and got to see them walk down the street. They were a fetching pair.
From the Cowgirl we went to see our second film of the day at the brand new Regal 14. Our second feature was Hot Fuzz. It was fantastic. Even funnier than Shaun of the Dead. I refuse to give any of the film away. Go see it and see it in a theater with good surround sound.
It’s not often that I can get Beki to see to movies in one day, so it was a rare treat.
I was eager to see the movie that beat out Pan’s Labyrinth for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards. Beki and I took a trip down to Santa Fe that included a screening of Live of Others. While I think Pan was the more deserving film, Lives of Others is a fantastic piece of work. I was disappointed by the overly long denouement, but that’s forgivable. I was most impressed by the pacing of the film. As Beki said, there were no “makeover moments” in which a character suddenly makes a change.
Prior to seeing the movie we went to The Plaza to get tamales, sit in the grass, and read/nap. Being the anniversary of the war, The Plaza was full of folks protesting the war in their own quiet ways. There were hippies with t-shirts and funny looking dogs. There were witty signs addressing the president around the monument in the center of the park. I saw an upper-middle class teenager dressed to the nines in Abercrombie and a popped collar with his light jacket open to reveal a white t-shirt with a handwritten message to the president about getting out of Iraq. There were bougie hippies (a class that’s extremely well represented in Santa Fe) talking about their love of Amy Goodman. There was also a mediocre clown doing juggling tricks for children. It was the warmest day of the year and the sun was in full force. We sat a blanket and read for two hours before getting some dinner before the film. A very pleasant afternoon.
Filed under: Film
In his review of 300 A.O. Scott wrote the following:
…it offers up a bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s.
I had written off the latest The Hold Steady album, Boys and Girls in America while in China. The other day I stumbled upon a bizarre video of them playing in a gym a song from the album to a bunch of high school students. I decided to give the new record a chance, so I bought it on iTunes. I really like it. It's not a revelation like Separation Sunday, but it's filled with top notch songs. Craig Finn does a lot more singing and lot less talking/yelling. It doesn't always work, but I'm not one to get hung up on “how things used to be.” The new piano player brings adds a great deal to the music.
Beki and I watched Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. It's a fine film. Those kinds of movies are often terrible, but the jokes in this are actually funny and sometimes even insightful.
I went with Leslie, Dave, Ben, and Mike to see 300 this evening. It was disappointing. That's saying a lot, because I expected to dislike it. I wasn't a fan of Sin City (another film based on a comic by Frank Miller), so I was expecting have similar feelings about 300. I expected to think it was neat looking for the first fifteen to twenty minutes and then have a strong desire to either take a nap or leave. Both films are entirely devoid of any kind of meaning, relying entirely on creating a unique visual experience and lots of “cool” deaths. I'm rarely impressed by “cool” deaths, they just feel pathetic. I'm slightly more swayed in a video game like Prince of Persia, but for the most part I find them dull at best and barbaric and pathetic at worst. I am, however, willing to take a peak at truly good visuals. Both Sing City and 300 are all about the presentation.
Unfortunately the visuals in both films can't hold my attention for very long. I saw everything I needed to see in Sin City after the first scene and the same holds true for 300. My hope with 300 was that I would get to see poetry in motion. Unfortunately this only happened once. They rest of the film was a series of tableaus. Tableaus are great, but what's the point of film if you have are stationary pictures? Why not sell me a really neat PowerPoint presentation? I'll take ballet over this stuff any day.
A few nights ago Beki and I had a conversation about whether or not there was really a place for “escapists” films. I get frustrated by folks saying, “It was just a silly movie and that's all it was trying to be. I don't always want my entertainment to be serious or important.” I certainly understand this sentiment; I've said it myself, and I certainly have a love for mindless films (I'm a huge fan of the The Transporter movies and look forward to seeing Crank). But I'm not sure that we should demand nothing of our escapist films. I think we ought to demand that they not be demeaning and condescending. Beki held up the new Hugh Grant film Music and Lyrics as a good example. One of my favorite bloggers also wrote a post that made a similar argument. I think they're both right on. A film like 300 is nothing more than two hours of harmful stereotypes about what makes “men” “Men” and “women” “Women”, stupid platitudes, and stupid amounts of blood.
I'm all for pretty movies, but let's keep them to twenty minutes if that's they are.
Pan's Labyrinth is an impressive film that doesn't quite reach it's full potential. This post will be a little critical of the film, but that's only because it was good enough to be taken seriously. The story centers around a little girl living in Franco's Spain. She and her pregnant mother have been taken to her step-father's (The Captain) army base in the country. The Captain is busy waiting for his son to be born and trying to kill off the rebels. He's a horrible human being. To escape her lousy life, Ofelia creates a fairy tale in which she is a lost princess trying to get back to her thrown. The film alternates between Ofelia's surreal, grotesque fantasy and the horrors of her reality.
Part of the goal of the film seems to be to juxtapose the unsettling images of Ofelia's fantasies with even more unsettling reality of the war and The Captain. She is confronted with all manner of disturbing images in her daydreams, but none as difficult to handle as her everyday world. At first the filmmakers seem to be trying to get at the horrors of Ofelia's surroundings by ironically having her to confront grotesque, frightening fantasies that can never live up to the horrors of The Captain. The monster with eyes in its hands that eats little children who taste of his banquet is nothing compared to The Captain who beats an innocent man to death with the butt end of a wine bottle. This kind of irony only takes us so far. The filmmakers want us to experience the horrors of human interaction by contrasting it with the most upsetting situations they can think of for a little girl to invent. But in the end they must rely on showing The Captain stitching his own mouth in order to make us cringe at the ugliness of man.
The director, Guillermo del Toro, never quite lives up to the promise of his concept. Films like this are trying to get us to understand, through art, what it is confront inhumanity as well as ultimate sacrifice. The problem is that showing us depraved acts doesn't get us there. I think his contrast of fantasy and reality has a great deal of poential, but del Toro isn't convinced by his own idea, and so resorts to just the kind of things that everyone else has for 100 hundred years. The opening battle in Saving Private Ryan is the rare film that offers an experience solely through recreation (and after that first fifteen minutes turns into a mostly cliche war film). Perhaps some one will be inspired by del Toro's attempt and give it another go.
I'll reiterate that I think there's a lot to admire in Pan's Labyrinth. I've focused on only one aspect of the film. I'd recommend it as one of the best films I've seen in the last year. Check it out on the big screen if you can. It reminded me of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle without being seven hours and chock full of endless, impossible symbolism and mythology.
I just gave Alba catnip. We keep in a sandwich bag. She likes to stick her head all the way in the bag, inhale, and take a bite. She does this for a few minutes and then runs around rubbing herself on things and trying to play with my feet.
Yesterday Ben, Dave, and I went to Bobcat Bite for a burger and The Screen to see The Holy Mountain.
The burger was amazing. It is a green chile cheese burger. I got mine with grilled onions. Bobcat is in the middle of nowhere (see the post about The Red Elvises for more about places in the middle of nowhere). It's just far enough outside of Santa Fe to make it annoying, but not far enough to call it “a nice drive.” The building was originally some kind of trading post (“I bet you could just come here, get drunk, and shoot stuff,” said Dave), but became the Bobcat Bite in 1953. It's a tiny place with a counter and six or seven tables. The walls are adorned with horrible but oh-so-perfect paintings of bobcats. We were early, so we got a table right away. What makes the burger so good? I imagine that they haven't cleaned their grill in the fifty-four years of its existence. The burgers are just the right doneness. I like mind medium rare, although Dave and Ben both approved of their medium burgers. It was probably the best burger I've ever had. The onions and home fries were not to be overlooked. I took most of the onions off the burger so as to enjoy the perfect meat and chile, but they were delicious on their own. Top it off with some ice tea (they don't serve beer) and you have yourself a perfect meal.
From the Bobcat we headed to a sporting good store to buy racquets for racquetball. We've started playing a couple times a week, so it was time to step our games with our own equipment.
We then drive over to The Screen at the College of Santa Fe. It's a great theater that shows lots of stuff you won't seen anywhere else. We were there to see Alejandro Jodorowsky's, The Holy Mountain. It's truly a bizarre movie in the mode of the more surrealist works of Godard and Bunuel. I can't say it's a great film, but it has it's moments. The first half has almost no dialogue and is filled with a mostly naked man carrying a partial limbed dwarf around a Mexican city. Just read the link to the Senses of Cinema sight and scroll down till you find the photo of crucified, skinned chickens. In the paragraphs surrounding the photo you'll find a pretty good synopsis. Much of the film was just silly and unenlightening, but there were moments when the whole experience of the images really comes together. You start doing away with the kind of logical truth statements that usually represent ideas and start to really understand the importance of experience over semantics. I also like how he gives up on trying to portray the horrors of violence and instead gives a good sense of why art will never quiet get it right. I think these kinds of films are worth seeing from time to time. It really puts a lot of other art and experience in a new context, even if many of the ideas and experiences don't hold water.
I don't know what to make of the rather warped portrayal of sex so prevalent in these kinds of films. Very rarely, if ever, did you see a woman who wasn't either topless or having some kind of sex. There were some women in the film who were powerful and part of the elite ten that the second half of the film focuses on, but so much of the film centers on the depravity of sex acts. But in nearly all the sex acts it is the woman who is the object. Men don't get off easy, but they're almost always in control. Part of this is intended to be satire, but I wonder at what point it stops being satire and starts to be part of the problem. The same thing happens in David Lynch films.
Overall it was quite a strange day. When I came home Beki had gone to see the new Hugh Grant film, leaving me alone to play Wii.
Beki, Ben, Dave, Leslie, and I watched the Oscars on Sunday. I've never actually watched the Oscars, but Beki wanted to make fish tacos, so we invited folks over to complain about the winners and bash the dresses. There was also a drunken bet regarding The Departed between Leslie and Ben that needed to be settled (I was not a fan of the movie, but maybe more on that in the future).
The tacos were my first experiment with frying in my new 12 inch cast iron pan. Beki got a recipe for the taco filling from a guy at whole foods (kale, grapefruit, garlic, onion, lemon…) and I was in charge of frying the salmon and cooking up my famous black beans. I reread the section on frying the Alton Brown's book (a must have for anyone interested in cooking). I prepared my dredging station of flower, egg with a little water, and panko bread crumbs. We had a pound and a half of salmon cut into chunks; it took me a half hour just to bread everything. On Saturday I purchased a candy/frying thermometer. I filled the pan with oil so that each piece of fish was half covered, heated the oil to about 375, and went to town. I must say that I impressed myself. The thermometer allowed me to keep the oil at a constant temperature, which resulted in brown, crunchy salmon without a hint of sogginess. Beki's filling came out great. Add heated corn tortillas, a little rice, some tomatoes, and my black beans to make a great feast. This was all washed down by sweet tea and followed by some homemade truffles.
The Oscars themselves were mildly entertaining. I had no idea that they were so long, but with five people and a cat screaming at the television, it wasn't so bad. The girl who won the Oscar for that movie about Motown sure can sing. I was glad to see Scorsesse win an Oscar, I just wish it had been for a good film.
I was pretty taken aback by just how self-congratualatory the whole thing is. It made me understand why people like O'Reily can so easily demonize Hollywood. I almost threw up when DeCaprio called it the first “green Oscars.”
On Saturday Beki and I went to see the Oscar nominated animated shorts at the center for contemporary arts. It featured the nominees and the runners up for nominations. The short that ended up winning was by far my favorite. It really used animation to it's fullest. The great part about the art form is that you can things that just don't work in live action. I'm not talking about drawing things that we can't make; you can do damn near anything with CGI these days. I'm talking about using the fact that things are animated to have things happen that just don't make sense when you have real people doing or pretending to do them. In the short that one the award there is a scene where one of the main characters is forced to leave the love of his life behind. He just falls flat on his back and is dragged away. It just works in the context of animation, where it would be stupid and awkward with real people. Unfortunately most all of the shorts went for kind of cheap laughs and that's about it. I don't quite understand why animation has been relegated to more of the world of entertainment and/or beauty. I'm all for both those things, but the great part about the winner is that it's about something important. Also, too much animation about animals. Why can't these people make stories about people?
Filed under: African American, Favorite, Film, Society, Thought Provoking
I just saw a documentary on HBO called Bastards of the Party. It's part essay film and part history lesson about the history of LA black gangs. It's told through the words and questions of a gang member trying to figure out how the Crips and the Bloods came into existence and how to change them. It's moving and horrifying and frustrating. Everyone needs to see this film.
The Life and Times of 