Change Your Image
actonbell
Reviews
Torn (2021)
A painful and frustrating portrait of trauma
Many glorious shots of the breathtaking Himalayas make a poignant backdrop for this painful portrait of a traumatized family. An agonizing watch because it's made by the eldest son of Alex Lowe, Max, who doesn't seem able, as a documentarian, to dig deep below the -- sorry -- avalanche of grief and anger that he and his family are still buried under. Many times I thought to myself, "These people are so locked in." No one seems to be able to dig very deep into themselves. When Max presses his mother about why she "fell in love" with her dead husband's climbing partner three months -- three months! -- after Alex went missing in an avalanche, she just says, "I was in love." That's the extent of your insight? Everyone has mask-like expressions, unable to look into themselves, except for Conrad Anker who is heartbreakingly aware of his survivor guilt. Even Max, who was driven to make this film to dig himself out in some way, can't say why he didn't take Conrad's last name when his two younger brothers did. He just says, "Yeah, I don't know why I did that." I found myself yelling in my head: "Because you resented your mother for moving on too quickly! Because you were still traumatized! Because no one in your family is able to process anything and you're unwilling to go along with the weirdly blank, smiling erasure of your mother!" I often find climbers hard to understand. This gave me a secondary understanding of what it is to be raised in a family who don't or can't seek to understand themselves. As a result, the final images of supposed peace and healing felt forced and scripted. I ache for all of them.
A Dog Called Money (2019)
I'm conflicted
I'll start by saying I've been a PJ Harvey fan since the beginning, and I saw her on tour for the album this film documents. I really enjoyed seeing more of who she is, her image has always been a bit impenetrable, remote, curated. But I'm wrestling with this film. First, for the first time I really noticed that PJ exclusively surrounds herself with (mostly adoring, it seems) men as her collaborators. Not one woman in the film, except for those in burkas or in the margins of her "grief safari" as another reviewer put it, or those who paid to gaze upon her as she invited spectators in a one-way windowed studio to watch her adoringly. I admired what she was trying to do, but it really looked like she was putting herself in the frame with a lot of marginalized, poor people, then recreating their melodies and rhythms back in her warm, immaculate, white studio with invited spectators to watch. It was... odd. Troubling, even. One detail amused me: in the credits, near the end, there's a space left before and after the designer of PJ's wardrobe, a credit given great privilege. That's when it occurred to me: She had her hair and make-up done in every shot -- in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, in the poor neighborhoods of DC. She brought these gorgeous, witchy designer outfits from (I learned, thanks to the credit) a Belgian couture designer. Every shot of these poor communities pans across something, yes, fascinating to watch, but then there's Polly, perched in her outfit, gazing on and also there to be gazed upon, witnessed, admired by us. What are we to make of this? It certainly smacks of exploitation. At the same time, I've always admired PJ as an artist, so shouldn't I give her credit for connecting with so many people and creating something out of her impressions of these overlooked or oppressed people and the beautiful art they make? Well, when Paul Simon collaborated with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he was later rightly called out for exploitation and appropriation. Is this different? Perhaps only in that the Afghani men keening in their worship were probably neither credited nor compensated for the melody she specifically recreated in her recording. She came off looking like her own very special, arty brand of diva, with troublingly British aspects of artistic colonization. At the same time, I know she was trying to do something ambitious and risky. She sure looked great doing it.
Coming Apart (1969)
Seize the machine!
I wanted to reply to bornjaded's post (though it's from two years ago and this is such an obscure film, I doubt we'll be having much of a dialogue). But still. I just watched this film with my husband last night and we both found it totally fascinating. I was particularly moved by Sally Kirkland's performance as Joanne -- and didn't recognize her at all until I saw her name in the credits. I love bornjaded's comparison to Lars Von Trier's heroic lead performances. I, too, thought she was incredibly brave in this film -- that drunk scene was almost unbearable to watch.
What I particularly wanted to respond to is your criticism of the rupturing of the film's point of view by showing jump cuts and the final slow motion sequence. I thought the final sequence was, as well as being stunningly effective film-making, formally justified in that it showed Joanne's destruction of Joe's whole visual construct, his camera, his voyeurism, his control. At the risk of sounding too dogmatic or reductive, the whole time I was watching the film, I kept laughing about how the so-called sexual revolution was really just the continued sexual enslavement of women with new clothes, new music and some new dance moves. It was just killing me how every woman who walks into Joe's apartment throws herself at him to the point where it was beginning to seem like a sixties male fantasy -- that is, until the arrival of Joanne who suddenly was this fully realized, intelligent, questing, sexually alive creature. A real match for Joe (the "Joe" and "Joanne" parallel only now occurs to me), including his madness. I kept thinking of Diane Arbus watching Sally's performance, how brave it must have been for her to step out of her inscribed world, take up a camera, re-make herself and finally lose her mind. So when the film ends with Joanne trashing Joe's place, I thought, "This is fantastic -- the rules of the male gaze are being destroyed, Joanne has arrived and now the whole machine is about to be re-made." It was like seeing the corrupt regime thrown over, or, in a stab at a psychological reading, the repressed feminine insisting on her full expression. In that sense, it made sense to me that the film could rupture its own form in this final moment. It is being taken over, painfully, by Joanne's subjectivity. I loved it. Woke up thinking about it first thing this morning, always a good sign of some powerful cinema.
As for the jump cuts, they didn't bug me as much as they did you, I felt like that device was more or less established throughout -- take another look at the first half of the film, several of the early scenes are fragmented with that same noisy sound effect.
Anyway, just wanted to try to engage with someone about this powerful but obscure film. I agree with another commenter that had it been European it might have been more recognized. Hell, most Godard is WAY more impenetrable than this was. Isn't it fun to imagine that people actually made movies like this once?
Chuck & Buck (2000)
problematic - note: chock full of specific spoilers
Just finished watching this, and I have to agree with some of the more critical posts. I too love indie films and indie film-making, but this film looks SO crappy almost all of the time. Everything in less than full daylight looks underexposed, all grainy and weirdly colored. It might have looked worse to me because I watched it on my computer, but it looked a lot worse than anything else I watch on my computer. I kept expecting the story to reveal something that justified what seemed to be an obvious choice to look purposefully bad -- and I suppose in a college paper I'd come up with some BS reason, but besides the hand-held for Buck's unstable POV, I can't imagine why this story needed to be told with such a deteriorated, amateur look. Am I missing something?
I was expecting many posts to agree with my larger criticism but only a few mentioned it -- the VERY OUT OF CHARACTER turn at the end when Chuck sleeps with Buck. One poster generously offered a motive suggesting Chuck felt extorted by Buck for fear of being exposed -- I didn't get that. Just seemed like he changed his mind. At one point, when Chuck is going home afterward, I was thinking, "Well, men are dogs. Maybe when some repellent dude with sugar breath and rotting teeth offers to give you a BJ it seems like a bad idea at first, but then what the hell. Lay back and go with it."
And would Chuck have invited Buck to his wedding? After he looked so uncertain about seeing him at the restaurant? I can sort of imagine how we got there... but honestly, the story ended about three times and I felt they could have skipped the wedding sequence altogether.
This being said, I really admired so much of the complex character work in both the writing and performances, which is why I'm open to a defense that could plausibly explain Chuck's reversal at the end. Maybe I just didn't get it.
I loved the scene when Buck came to Beverly and said, "There's no love for me." So many great examples of underwriting in this. Or the next scene when Buck and Beverly are in the diner -- about four lines of dialogue, instead of some long heartfelt blah blah from Beverly explaining why Buck should have hope because of some experience in her own life. Nope. Just some fragmentary thoughts while Buck sips Coke. Nice.
As a theater geek, I love the message that Buck finds the one community that will welcome all unrepentant weirdos -- bizarre little theaters! (However, I did find myself worried any time Buck was alone with the child actors from the theater... "Oh, God, they're not gonna make me go through all that horror in 'Happiness' are they?")