Reel Girly

With all the hullabaloo of SFIFF50 just behind me, I’m hoping to be a bit more dutiful to my blog and really, what better way for me to dive in than to dance about in the well worn path of Raimi’s newest Spidey saga?

I’m really surprised to find that my views are largely my own - I mean, no one else seemed to think Spiderman 3 was political. Arguably, I’m hinging my entire thesis on one shot: the shot in which a finally redeemed Spiderman comes to save MJ in front of a mob of media and lands dead center in front of an iconic, waving flag. However, it seems to me that a film in a previously very intelligent franchise, helmed by a very intelligent (genius at times) filmmaker, is not ridiculously simple for no good reason. Even amidst the static created by heaps of needless villains, the plotline remained quite incomplex. I read all about Raimi’s casting requirements and I get he was up against a few walls, but people love to forget that in the interest of communicating ideological content, competent filmmakers have historically chosen to wrap their ideologies in simple films. They do so to give the viewer the time and mental bandwidth to consider the story’s implications and to find the moral. I’m of the mind that Spiderman’s third grade reading level plotline dug at a brand of redemption that seems a tad…shall I say prescriptive.

Spiderman encounters Venom, chooses to be poisoned, believes his choices (at first) to be partially charitable and then his downward spiral goes far deeper than any of other brands of damnation present in the first two films. His decisions, if you will, extend beyond self-preservation and go into offensive positioning. Also, call me goofy, but his eventual ally in Harry was a little Tony Blair for me. I’m just saying.

As far as the overall thrill-factor of the film goes, I’m with the chorus. 3 doesn’t match the candor of it’s predecessors, and it smacks of compromise all over the place, but if I’m right, and Raimi’s goal was to make a political parable, or even a letter to the president (dare I say it) 3 achieved that goal. Well, presuming that the president will take this third grade level “letter” as a message from the Raimis. Really, that’s funny all on it’s own. No punch line (or pimp suit) required.

p.s. i have some great press stills but i’m still experience some glitches with uploading. They’re massive files and the way I’m making them smaller isn’t working out. Will edit the post as soon as I can figure out how to deal with the images. Best! -S

Orange Revolution is a relatively traditional documentary about the Ukranian popular uprising in 2004, that tracks the ascension of Victor Yushchenko and his/the people’s battle against the corrupt regime that suppressed his election.

As with any movement that is popularly successful, the specifics of the politics really bog down the popular sentiment – as a result, we don’t hear much about the beliefs of the presidential elect, outside of his position of opposition to the regime. Journalists helpfully explain that bribes were the currency of the regime: you could bribe your way out of jail, bribe your way into college, bribe your way out of prior convictions. The regime’s supported candidate proved this last note as he had two convictions on his record but still considered himself “cleansed in the eyes of the law.”

This doc proves that popular political sentiments, no matter how powerful can’t be more widespread than they are broad. At the same time it’s made by an American and one can’t help feel the pangs of familiarity in the circumstances of the 2004 Ukrane election and the US 2004 election…A regime supporter even raised the question “And then did Bush get elected fairly?!” as if to suggest that one election (or fraud) somehow legitimizes the other. It’s worth mentioning that there was a good laugh at that line since the supporter was slurring and drunk. Regardless of our nation’s apparent similarities or differences, stories of such powerfully unifying belief are always inspiring and that alone justifies the efforts put forth in this film. To an extent Orange Revolution, which does make mention of the censorship and restraining of information of the press during the elections, seems to be acting as sort of proxy to the news. Not a bad proxy – there is a basic neutrality to the information though it all comes from one side of the battlefield, but the representations are largely quite neutral. Even at the end when a note alerts us that, now that the news agencies are independent, they blast all the candidates equally. À nous la liberté.

A continuation of his 1997 opus Henry Fool, Fay Grim is a similarly off-center ode to love and human potential by indie-auteur Hal Hartley. Now following the story of abandoned wife Fay (brilliantly played by Parker Posey) the film begins in Queens and establishes the barely contained chaos that Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) left when he abandoned Fay and their son Ned (Liam Aiken) seven years ago.

- Originally I put up my whole interview then I got my head about me and realized this film is hold review. I’ll put up the whole review closer to the release date. Sorry for the messiness!

I interviewed Hartley and Posey on Bealtaine and I’ll be selling those interviews (and blogging about it) shortly. Hartley said Ned’s the next up for a title film and that the Grim/Fool family will be like Hartley’s “Skywalker” family.

Also, please check out the photos my genius husband has put up on his flickr site. Of course his images will accompany my interviews no matter where they may end up;-)

A suitable, if odd, J-Horror by Takeshi Furusawa, Ghost Train walks a vague line between wholly realized and intelligent direction and slipshod decision-making. The basic plotline is classical and somewhat meaningfully predictable: Nana cares for her younger sister Noriko while her mother and only parent is in the hospital for (wait for it) heart trouble. Noriko’s classmate Takahashi has gone missing after finding a lost train pass at the station. The train pass was once owned by Yaeko Aonumo (and conduit of unspeakable evils) who comes back to haunt the Mizunashi train tunnel and take people to the underworld beneath the tunnel as she chants “I want what’s mine.” Simple, right?

Of course, a series of accidents have taken place in the tunnel but only one threatening, outcast conductor has kept any records. The transport authority is quick to penalize any employees who admit to seeing anything troublesome or ephemeral in the tunnel. At first this seems like a comment on the intolerance of elders to the openness of the young, but later it becomes clear that the authorities, including the police, knew of the dangers in full and their repeated cover-up revealed a rather profound comment upon the extent to which greed can overpower survival. Every authority dismisses the ghost sightings even as lost children notices pop up all over the city. When Noriko is seen (followed ominously by a shadow) on the tunnel station’s surveillance camera, the police and the transport authority say “this is proof she’s safe.” That one got a laugh.

The film’s strengths seem oddly paired to its shortcomings and that’s what makes this film so hard to either celebrate or dismiss. In the first few scenes of the film there’s this great moment when a train conductor and important (if secondary) character has a ghost sighting that is represented through a series of dissolves that piece together his face as surveys the scene of the sighting. The implication is quite beautiful – it was as if to say the ghost is something you couldn’t see concretely, rather, she lived between the cuts – any possible puns intended in full. Another great moment involved a long take on Nana as she searched a space we knew contained a ghost. She walked on a balcony slowly and the camera kept reframing her which left the audience searching the frame for the reveal of the ghost. That was great horror direction. Additionally it’s worth noting all the women in the film were usually threatened by their children who had been overtaken by the ghost train and came back to (presumably) take their mothers with them. The location of the tunnel developed a great formalist device to remind us of the strange connection motherhood had to the ghost train. It was eerily metaphorical. And no, there is no sex in the film.

Nana eventually finds the reason for the tragedies of the tunnel are less solve-able than she had thought and we do get to see some evidence of other-worldly powers at work. What followed, however, seemed tacked on, even laughable. The audience stayed through the credits to see if the end really was The End. I took the end to be quite political – the resolution is both easy and absurdist, and the final moral is that all terrible things, no matter how old or how powerful, can all be dissolved my a mighty, masculine explosion. Eh. I guess, if you can’t have sex, you might as well have some fire power.