mimeo wheel

The Strategy of the Snail by Sergio Cabrera (1993)

4/5

A lot of fun top to bottom and a warm affirmation of strategy in all endeavours. Opening with a critique of bull-headed militant activism, the importance of ingenuity and creativity is asserted and explored throughout. 

Though the catholic priest is treated too fondly for my liking, I appreciate that he and religion are mocked and catholicism is disbelieved by the two heroes. 

Rabid by David Cronenberg (1977)

2/5

What a bizarre movie to watch in 2020. It starts with a plague and ends with police brutality. Unfortunately, Cronenberg doesn’t have much to say about either of these things. In the trajectory of his career, it is the most assured and watchable thing he’d made up to that point: the framing, acting and cutting have matured significantly. Rather than straining to say something and offering a clunky and inarticulate sequence, he's made a movie. Ironically, it is about so little that it once again doesn’t pay off much. 

It’s pleasing how far it strays from having a lead, thinly veiled as an ensemble piece, he seems interested in the patterns of contagions, in this and the two pictures before it. A viral map is drawn and the scenes are linked together as infection encounters. Perhaps it is the bias of knowing both his previous movies, and the ones to come that makes me think of infectious ideas  and this work being a search for a metaphor for concepts and desires beyond language and their transformative imprint on a body and a society. Unfortunately, that’s a reach and if it was the movie he’d wanted to make, it would’ve been the movie he made. Instead, we have a fairly decent seventies zombie apocalypse, conceptually more barren than I’m used to with Cronenberg and therefore disappointing. 

I was also displeased to see the first appearance of Indigenous actors in his work being two characters in a police station, undergoing a breathalyzer test. As easily as I could make the argument that it was an early study in police bias and systemic racism, I can dismantle it: If he really cared, he would’ve given one of these actors a part beyond background set decoration for his police station. 

Hamilton by Thomas Kail (2020)

2/5

The latest piece of american hagiography, Hamilton, is by turns impressive, boring, corny, inspiring and irritating -- which is pretty par for the course when it comes to american block buster musicals. Its induction into the Disney halls gives it a different historical position. It is a piece now of Disney’s official american history, beside Spielberg, Steamboat Willie and The Simpsons, and it will be the first place many children encounter the story of how america was fought for, founded and built. As such we see a country that is “young, scrappy and hungry”, “where an immigrant can make their mark”. I am torn on this. At best, it transforms the perception of the country, showing black and hispanic leaders at its very conception, therefore planting the seeds of a nation beyond racism in the young viewers it captures. But it is dubious whether it is creating a future with further possibility and potential for immigrants or continuing a tradition of glorifying america’s past of storied brutality. The very neighbourhoods that birthed the forms Hamilton borrows are still suffering so tragically from this history. 

Many of the songs are infectious and now and again even powerful. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance as Alexander Hamilton is almost excellent, faltering only when it comes to tackle the huge grief of losing a son, where he leans into forced sobs, which might have worked from the balcony but to a camera up close they read as tried and shallow. Leslie Odom Jr. brings the house down with his tour de force performance as Aaron Burr, he faced the darknesses and emptinesses of that character at its very root and gives us energy, subtlety and dynamic nonstop -- which is valuable: he is an excellent candidate for narrator of the story, being quite representative of many people in powerful positions across the american government. The relationship between the two is well developed and far and away the best. Next to the two of them most other characters are caricatures and prototypes. Jonathon Groff is the other absolute highlight, his turn as King George is gripping and he makes the most of every minute on stage while managing to look relaxed and in complete command. Lastly the ensemble deserves a mention, their work carries the whole musical and functions as the engine (just like america). 

I can’t help but feel Hamilton’s tenacity and dogged pursuit of his ideals. A character like this is always exhilarating to encounter in art and spurs the same nobility in the spirits of its viewers. I was reminded of China’s recent version of historical iconography: The Leader, an anime about Karl Marx. And this brings me to the sorest point I can’t help but get stuck on as I watch it. Ultimately, The Leader works as a piece of art for everybody and is delivered in a spirit of internationality and universality. Hamilton, on the other hand, is as nationalist as they come, it is a major celebration of america and in the end the actual politics aren’t as exciting as the melodies. 

A last couple notes I’d like to get off my chest:

1. I’m tired of New York telling itself it’s the best city in the world and that there’s a revolution happening in Manhattan. Neither are true. 

2. The dismissal of the French Revolution in it is as disgraceful now as america’s was then. 

3. Just imagine if the first half was Alexander Hamilton’s life and the second half was Eliza Hamilton’s after he died and it was still called Hamilton...

The Story of Qiu Ju by Zhang Yimou (1992)

4/5

Touki Bouki by Djibril Diop Mambéty (1973)

3/5

It is one of those movies that captures a contour drawing of freedom. It circles the idea and the hunger for it. While it never gives us a real glimpse at what freedom looks like, by showing the desperate pursuit of it it affirms its existence.

The Official Story by Luis Puenzo (1985)

4/5

Besieged by Bernardo Bertolucci (1998)

4/5

Bertolucci has always been a consummate critic of the temptations of the bourgeoisie. Besieged, which I had missed, turns out to be a masterful indictment. When Kinsky’s (David Thewlis) aggressive confession of love and attempt to purchase Shandurai (Thandie Newton) fail, he turns to a much wilier plot. He dons the role of saint and martyr, selling all of his most prized possessions in order to purchase the freedom of Shandurai’s husband. The white man’s charity proves to be the ultimate seduction technique (if one were to think for a moment the plot is intended to be genuinely romantic, they need only look to the title). The european artist looking at and sexualizing the african woman working for him in order to gain inspiration for his art was an impressive exchange of cuts, dialogue-less, to make a point brutally clear. 

Shogun Assassin by Kenji Misumi, Robert Houston (1980)

2/5

Shivers by David Cronenberg (1975)

2/5

As a disclaimer, I don’t generally find a lot of juice from the B horror movie and Cronenberg’s intellectual twist on it was what made it at all digestible to me, rather than being an exciting twist on a well-loved form. I was glad he did something beyond the limited format of Crimes of the Future and Stereo (the introduction through advertisement and slider photography functioning as an inventive sublation of his previous forms). 

Runaway Bride by Garry Marshall (1999)

4/5

Marshall’s second outing with the Julia Roberts / Richard Gere romantic duo, nine years after their smash Pretty Woman, captures the same effervescent chemistry between them. It feels like a reunion, and Marshall’s lack of much cinematic sense or style is almost made up for with the celebratory feeling of friendship, love and laughter that each frame is chocked full of. However much Marshall knew about movies, he did know about loyalty: written into the contract of every movie he ever directed was a role for his friend Hector Elizondo, whom he met playing basketball, and that’s the spirit of this movie, which is a light hearted examination of pursuing dreams and committing to love. We are grateful for the critique of any marriage out of convenience, even if it is with the one you love and the simple lesson that before they can have any relationship, he has to find his artistic voice, no matter how successful he is, and she has to put her work out, no matter how scared she is. 

It reminds me of, say, social realism. In America, and this is exported all over the globe, there is a capitalist narrativism. It comes with a particular story structure and a hatful of lessons you may teach. Anything beyond that is not censored, it is, rather, not funded. And in a world where money is meaning, we do not watch that which was not funded, in both production and, even more so, marketing. 

Marshall’s movie is capitalist narrativism with genuine warmth and sincere love but ultimately it does not escape that realm, and like Virgil, it is not a movie I imagine will make it past a certain ring of purgatory when it comes to the march of history. All that admitted I will study and soak up the wonder that is young Julia - her performances are irresistible and endlessly watchable. 

A last note about Capitalist Narrativism:  -It must have a story.

-It must be formally uninteresting (”don’t get in the way of the story”). 

-Neither it nor its characters can imagine an alternative to the world as it is (Global Capitalism led by America is proposed as a given and eternal format rather than a historical peculiarity or transition moment not even a century old.)

This of course does not cover the entirety of American or Hollywood output. These forms work in tandem with the sophistic directors who wear the costume of trailblazer, deal in gimmicks, win academy awards and use every chance they get to discuss their artistic integrity and express support for the Clintons of the world. 

I appreciate Marshall at least for not being one of these, he keeps it simple, fast paced, funny, endearing and occasionally insightful. To be very frank I tottered between a 3 and a 4 here -- for all I say, this was my third time watching it and likely won’t be my last. 

A final thought: There’s a beautiful scene of confrontation between Ike and Maggie (candy coloured bulbs of light out of focus in the background, flower crowns and Hawaiian shirts). In it they each call each other the most lost person they’ve ever met. After all past attempts at love and commitment for both of them, it is the most lost person they met, who is the one they truly love. It is the one who can see they are lost and call them on it. Loving someone doesn’t scramble coordinates but rather reveals to them their coordinates were scrambled. We do not lose ourselves in love but discover that we were always lost. It draws a circle around the zero inside. It introduces us to the stranger that is ourselves. 

“You want a man who’ll lead you down the beach, with his hand over your eyes, just so you can discover the feel of sand under your feet. You want a guy that’ll wake you up at dawn, just bursting to talk to you. Can’t wait another minute. Just to find out what you’ll say.”

Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou (1991)

4/5

Again Zhang’s mastery of colour astounds and sculpts. Exploring the repression of tradition, Raise the Red Lantern takes one theme from Red Sorghum, the prison of marriage, to its fullest extent. Wheeling through the seasons, Zhang pits himself against the repressive force of tradition, pinning and shaping it as a villain, showing how it spoils and poisons people. By never showing the husband or master, he shows the master most explicitly: he is nothing but a moving red lantern, guided and dictated by the dramas of the mistresses, from one house to another, existing purely to carry tradition, to dot the i. 

Sambizanga by Sarah Moldoror (1972)

4/5

Black God, White Devil by Glauber Rocha (1964)

1/5

Crimes of the Future by David Cronenberg (1970)

1/5

The promise of Stereo is abbreviated here. Still searching for some sort of formal language the movie stumbles on itself and gives us a messy little picture without much to offer in any direction. What might have had something of interest if it was simplified and streamlined into a five minute short, here is stretching an already flimsy concept into something of very little value, which finally ends in a weird pedophilic (this is not critical insight but literally where the movie goes) landscape. 

Memoirs of a Geisha by Rob Marshall (2005)

1/5

Memoirs suffers from what I think of as the Gladiator syndrome. Like Ridley Scott’s movie it is a movie that centres around and fetishizes the format of slavery. It goes without saying that compared to the epic tragedies so well crafted by Mizoguchi, Rob Marshall’s orientalist tourism is offensive and pathetic. 

On top of its endorsement of slavery, the love story is predatory. The chairman speaking, with a geisha on either arm, to a little girl and confessing later that he knew all along who she was, cannot help but appear as grooming. 

I’m also at an utter loss why she needs to have blue eyes and why that seems to be the thing that sets her apart and makes her special (ohhhh right. It’s white supremacy!). Adding on top of that, she paints her face white to make herself more beautiful, moments that are shown in lush and motivational montages. It is an evil and hurtful movie. 

Red Sorghum by Zhang Yimou (1987)

5/5

Cairo Station by Youssef Chahine (1958)

2/5

The movie makes me think of what someone once described as a newspaper film, within the vehicle we’re going to hop through all the sections of current events and get a picture of the world. Ironically it’s a movie narrated by a newspaper salesman. The train station that he works at serves as a kind of microcosm of civilization. Businesses, romances, varying social classes, police and more populate the space, people come and go, the market fluctuates, unions (in terms of labour and marriage) are proposed, and much of the society is measured by how it treats and handles the ones with the power and the ones without. 

In one light the movie serves as a kind of early look into incel behaviour told with empathy but never endorsement, pity or permission. A man who is likely high functioning with some slight mental and physical disabilities, Qinawi, assists at the newspaper stand and plasters his small private room with the imported images of american women sexualized, blonde curls and brassieres. There is a heartbreaking moment when to bring the image on his wall closer to the image of the woman whom he covets, Hannuma, a woman who works in the train station illegally selling soda pop from a metal bucket, he draws a crude metal bucket upon the arm of the two dimensional model. While he prints the sexualized posters he looks at on the women he passes in the street, he prints the menial and precarious labour on those posters themselves in order to sustain the fantasy.

This becomes more twisted as he turns instead to cutting up the posters. Initially he is only cutting them out from their background. So they will be printed right into the background of his workplace, but this becomes a kind of beheading as he hears in the newspaper about the gruesome murder of a woman and her discovered body, found in the luggage of the trains where they work. 

Throughout the movie we return to frames of clocks, a rhythmic distancing from the world and the action. Because the time on the clocks never matters to us as an audience they serve instead as a reminder of the figure of the clock itself, extracted entirely from day and night. No one ever finds a moment off. There aren’t nights, holidays, weekends or vacations, there are breaks and nothing more. 

The only moments of breath or freedom from this cyclical grind are between Hannuma and Qinawi. First, when he proposes to her at the foot of the fountain.  He offers to build her a house, get away from it all. She is fond of him but is in no way interested sexually or maritally and when she dismisses him for being poor he stands beside the statue and takes on, briefly, a regal potential, so much so that she even has to glance for a moment between him and the statue. Perhaps his first and worst mental disturbance is that he is capable of dreaming and finds himself poor instead.

The second comes between them again, on the train car together, in the night. He is sitting and she swings out and catches the edges of the passing light along her profile, looking down the line and both of them laughing as they dream. “I’ll miss the station”, she admits, playing along in his imaginary future momentarily, trapped in the clocked, revolving door of passengers whom they serve.

Two unique among those guests that come from the outside are the secret boyfriend of a pining lover only briefly at the station, and a government delegate, there to investigate the possibility of establishing and ratifying the union Abu Sri, Hannuma’s fiance, has been the primary advocate for. Interesting how the police are despicable and hindrances but a representative of the state is a sign of the possibility of change and improvement. The state here yet has the hope of guarding, endorsing and empowering its citizens. The police, on the other hand, restrict economic flow, protect the people with more money and more property and serve to make the lives of the poor and working difficult and unpleasant.