self-awareness
Confirming my thesis that nostalgia becomes increasingly indiscriminate as you grow older, there is a tendency now for films that would have been (indeed, were) dismissed without a backward glance in the 70's or 80's to be lovingly restored and reissued on DVD to cash in on the 'Grindhouse' boom - here, for example, is The Day Time Ended (1979) from Eighty Eight Films ('Classic movies treated with respect') starring Jim Davis, who used to be Jock Ewing in Dallas.
It is a thing of naive and faintly eerie charm, in which a family headed by the grizzled Davis repair to their desert homestead to be assailed by a bewildering variety of phenomena, including stop-motion animated monsters, a miniature spaceship and a little green man doing ballet. Eventually, Davis comes to the conclusion that 'a space-time warp' is responsible, though he admits that neither he nor anyone else really knows what that is.
Though the family no longer seem able to return to the world they know, a kind of happy ending emerges simply from the daughter's funny feeling that everything is going to be alright. As they wander off into what looks like a backdrop from the original Star Trek (in fact, a matte painting of a 'city of light and crystal' by Jim Danforth) Jim Davis concludes that 'maybe this was all meant to be.' The End.
Maybe this was all meant to be. It's one of those moments in film where you are privileged to hear the authentic voice of the scriptwriter. You picture him furiously wondering how the fuck am I going to explain all this? then, after a few more brandies/snorts of coke, having an epiphany: I know! 'Maybe it was meant to be...'
My favourite moment of this kind is from a film called The Blood Beast Terror, an ill-advised yet (to me) strangely compelling farrago from 1967 about a woman who turns into a giant bloodsucking moth, a creature which it is clearly beyond the abilities or budget of the film makers to evoke. At the climax Peter Cushing ends the creature's reign of terror by the simple expedient of lighting a small bonfire, towards which the moth (looking, in a brief shot, like a duster thrown past the camera) is instinctively attracted, only to perish in the flames. At this point PC Glynn Edwards (later Dave the barman in Minder) turns to Inspector Peter Cushing to say: 'They'll never believe this at the yard, sir.'
To which Cushing replies in a world-weary tone, anguished eyes staring out into the night: 'They'll never believe it anywhere.' So we see that the film is haunted less by the titular blood beast, than by a horrified awareness of its own fate.
In a Thai film called In April The Following Year There Was A Fire, seen at this year's London Film Festival, a character bumps into a film crew making a film called (you guessed it) In April The Following Year There Was A Fire. He is told that this is an 'indie movie', likely to appear in international film festivals, with a DVD release if they are lucky. Here is a film that knows its audience - not a very large one. Even in NFT3, a small screen, there was plenty of room to stretch out. It's as if nobody wants to see a meandering Thai art film.
I'm quite a fan of Thai movie director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but I don't like to talk about it. Partly, that's because of the name, which is very difficult to say or spell, but also it's his films. You can't describe them without making them seem interminably boring - yet aimless and obscure as they might seem on the surface to be, there's something mysteriously fascinating about them. IATFYTWAF is not one of his films, yet it seems to owe something to him. There is the same emphasis on randomness (highlights include: the grooming of a horse). But just because AW gets away with it, that doesn't mean everyone can, and this didn't always work for me. It wasn't until the end that I understood that it was actually about something - the director's mother, who died. It was about her in the very specialised sense that she is barely mentioned at all. It's about her absence.
Having realised this, I felt that maybe I had missed something, and should see it again. That's how these art movies get you - with Taken 2, you'd just figure you'd made a mistake. And it may be that I should have just given in and let the film take me, as it were. It was just that there seemed a thin line between that and falling asleep.
The new AW film, Mekong Hotel, was actually showing at the festival on the same day, but in Hackney. I wonder what it says about me that I'm quite happy to be transported to Thailand in the movies, but won't visit Hackney in real life...
It is a thing of naive and faintly eerie charm, in which a family headed by the grizzled Davis repair to their desert homestead to be assailed by a bewildering variety of phenomena, including stop-motion animated monsters, a miniature spaceship and a little green man doing ballet. Eventually, Davis comes to the conclusion that 'a space-time warp' is responsible, though he admits that neither he nor anyone else really knows what that is.
Though the family no longer seem able to return to the world they know, a kind of happy ending emerges simply from the daughter's funny feeling that everything is going to be alright. As they wander off into what looks like a backdrop from the original Star Trek (in fact, a matte painting of a 'city of light and crystal' by Jim Danforth) Jim Davis concludes that 'maybe this was all meant to be.' The End.
Maybe this was all meant to be. It's one of those moments in film where you are privileged to hear the authentic voice of the scriptwriter. You picture him furiously wondering how the fuck am I going to explain all this? then, after a few more brandies/snorts of coke, having an epiphany: I know! 'Maybe it was meant to be...'
My favourite moment of this kind is from a film called The Blood Beast Terror, an ill-advised yet (to me) strangely compelling farrago from 1967 about a woman who turns into a giant bloodsucking moth, a creature which it is clearly beyond the abilities or budget of the film makers to evoke. At the climax Peter Cushing ends the creature's reign of terror by the simple expedient of lighting a small bonfire, towards which the moth (looking, in a brief shot, like a duster thrown past the camera) is instinctively attracted, only to perish in the flames. At this point PC Glynn Edwards (later Dave the barman in Minder) turns to Inspector Peter Cushing to say: 'They'll never believe this at the yard, sir.'
To which Cushing replies in a world-weary tone, anguished eyes staring out into the night: 'They'll never believe it anywhere.' So we see that the film is haunted less by the titular blood beast, than by a horrified awareness of its own fate.
In a Thai film called In April The Following Year There Was A Fire, seen at this year's London Film Festival, a character bumps into a film crew making a film called (you guessed it) In April The Following Year There Was A Fire. He is told that this is an 'indie movie', likely to appear in international film festivals, with a DVD release if they are lucky. Here is a film that knows its audience - not a very large one. Even in NFT3, a small screen, there was plenty of room to stretch out. It's as if nobody wants to see a meandering Thai art film.
I'm quite a fan of Thai movie director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but I don't like to talk about it. Partly, that's because of the name, which is very difficult to say or spell, but also it's his films. You can't describe them without making them seem interminably boring - yet aimless and obscure as they might seem on the surface to be, there's something mysteriously fascinating about them. IATFYTWAF is not one of his films, yet it seems to owe something to him. There is the same emphasis on randomness (highlights include: the grooming of a horse). But just because AW gets away with it, that doesn't mean everyone can, and this didn't always work for me. It wasn't until the end that I understood that it was actually about something - the director's mother, who died. It was about her in the very specialised sense that she is barely mentioned at all. It's about her absence.
Having realised this, I felt that maybe I had missed something, and should see it again. That's how these art movies get you - with Taken 2, you'd just figure you'd made a mistake. And it may be that I should have just given in and let the film take me, as it were. It was just that there seemed a thin line between that and falling asleep.
The new AW film, Mekong Hotel, was actually showing at the festival on the same day, but in Hackney. I wonder what it says about me that I'm quite happy to be transported to Thailand in the movies, but won't visit Hackney in real life...
posted by martin at 11:59 AM
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