the flimsy, sad future of bartholomew's song

IMDB.com estimates that Bartholomew's Song cost $2,500, a figure that's been rattling around in my head while I've been thinking how damn good it is. The short is only about 10 minutes long, but the directors, Lowell Frank and Destin Daniel Cretton, have made a virtue out of a low budget and a brief run time.

B.'s Song takes place in a dystopia where workers sleep in cell-like rooms and assemble little cubic things at an absurdly slow rate. Life for Bartholomew 467 and his fellow Bartholomews (it seems that every man is named Bartholomew) is monotonous and comically repetitive, but their blank faces suggest that this isn't generally a problem.

This is a good world to set a cheap short in, because that basic premise can be established in only six static shots that begin Song. The simplicity of the shots echoes the mechanical, modular quality of the Bartholomews' world, where everything is as discreet and functional as the cogs of a pocket watch.

the psychopathology of lying and/or filmmaking in kiarostami's close-up

If I'm going to talk about Close-Up, the 1990 film by Abbas Kiarostami (pretty much Iran's most lauded filmmaker), I'm going to have to talk about a bunch of things I don't actually want to talk about before I can get to what actually interests me.

That's because I only engaged half-heartedly with the film's biggest idea: Close-Up's main thematic strand is the the process and illusion of cinema itself and the artificiality of the movie-making process. The film stems from the story of Hossein Sabzian, an Iranian who (in real life) passed himself off as well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a Tehran family of some means, the Ahankhahs. (As an American, I don't know how classy they were by the standards of Iran in 1990, but they have a kempt house and a gated courtyard.)

Sabzian was arrested after his lie was uncovered, and a large chunk of the movie consists of his trial, in the form of a documentary. This footage is interlarded with stagings of his interactions with the Ahankhahs — which, strangely, are acted out by Sabzian and the family themselves. In fact, as Godfrey Cheshire explains in his Criterion essay on the film, "Contrary to what most first-time viewers assume, none of its scenes are strictly documentary. Not just the reenactments but all the other scenes, too, are at least partly scripted or otherwise contrived by Kiarostami."

how did this get made?: best. test audience. ever.

The basic ingredients of How Did This Get Made?, a fortnightly podcast on the Earwolf network, are not promising if you're looking for a nuanced film critique. For each regular episode, three actor-comedians are joined by a guest to ridicule a single bad movie. Ostensibly, the show has no higher purpose than to talk about how awful that film is, which just sounds like a recipe for cheap shots and little-to-no actual insight into what makes a film terrible.

But How Did This Get Made? is probably my single favorite movie podcast. On top of being very funny, HDTGM makes very specific and valid criticisms, and it ends up doing a much better job than many amateur (or even professional) critics in analyzing what has gone wrong. In short, Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas are possibly the best test audience of all time.

mirror mirror: shrek with (too much?) ambition

I watched another movie by Tarsem Singh this week, Mirror Mirror. He also directed Immortals, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. I like to write about outliers, and Singh's movies are vivid and cinematic in a way that most modern Hollywood directors don't bother with. Think Avatar but with arty intentions and even richer detail.

Mirror Mirror is a retelling of Snow White, which saves me the trouble of summarizing the plot. Suffice it to say that in this version the seven dwarves are thieves with a hideout. To get what I meant by "vivid" above, take a look at this screen grab of their den:

Check out the meticulously arranged mess in the front there. It looks like the perfect still life, and I suspect it's a visual reference to some classic painting I don't know, but in any event, the shot gives you a sense of what the movie is like: lots and lots of texture. This is a film where the bandit hideout has elegant, patterned wallpaper. (Look at the background of that screen grab and you'll see a sort of Japanese engraving sort of motif.)

hats of the damned: pasolini's oedipus rex

I suppose I came to Pier Paolo Pasolini's film version of Oedipus Rex hoping that it would work with the meaning I had gotten out of the play, which I analyzed in some depth a few weeks ago. My conclusion was basically that Sophocles' original play works best if we think of it as a parable about the sin we do unknowingly and the dangers of knowledge.

Pasolini's film, however, doesn't really focus on these aspects, or at least not in any way I can tell, and I'm kind of unsure what to make of it overall. The movie's major innovation is that it begins and ends in 20th century Italy. In some early part of the 20th century (I can't figure out what year exactly this would have been), Pasolini shows us a young military man who is jealous of the attention his wife pays to their infant son. Shortly, the setting changes to ancient Greece and tells us the traditional story of Oedipus in chronological order (as opposed to the play, where Oedipus is already king and we only learn of his true back story through exposition). Then, where the play would end with Oedipus blind and shamed, the movie magically transposes the same actor to 1970s Italy, making him a blind beggar.

the cinematography of la dolce vita: that's deep, man

I've got an essay coming on La Dolce Vita for the Brattle Theatre Film Notes blog — I'll add a link when they put it up. The Brattle Theatre's Film Notes blog just posted my essay about La Dolce Vita, but I also wanted to post these great screen grabs that show how damn satisfying the cinematography is and the incredible use of depth.

If you want the tl;dr version of this post, just look at these two compositions, which are the opening shots of their respective scenes:

Either one of these shots is near-perfect on its own, but they're even better put side by side like this, because you can see the echoes: The top one is almost all white, the bottom almost all black; the top shot has a vanishing point somewhere on the right half; the bottom's is at approximately the mirror point on the left.

i need to stop writing this post before i convince myself that sucker punch is actually brilliant

Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's new Superman movie, is coming out this weekend. I'm going to use that as a reason to write about Sucker Punch, his last movie, because I've been wanting to write about this hot mess ever since it came out two years ago.

Although it's probably not very good in the final analysis, Sucker Punch plays with a lot of smart ideas, including an ironic self-awareness that most blockbuster action directors never mess with. In case you're wondering if I'm just trying to find something complex about this movie, worry not: This self-consciousness is plainly implied by the movie itself, and even if Snyder can't really figure out what that means or what to do with it, I like that he tried.

We're immediately put on notice by the first image, a slow crawl forward through a theater that moves toward a curtain with the Warner Bros. logo on it. That curtain opens up onto another curtain with the production company's logo, which in turn opens directly onto the first scene. In this very first image, then, we are being given a staged scene that is patently artificial, since of course we don't normally watch the action of a movie take place on a theater stage unless it happens to take place in a theater. It's the film equivalent of breaking the fourth wall.