Jonathan Rosenbaum Video Interview

james bond

jonathan rosenbaum and scott foundas

top movies of 07

(new movies only)
1) the flight of the red balloon
2) silent light
3) still life
4) i'm not there
5) day night day night
6) super bad
7) lake of fire
8) offside
9) syndromes and a century
10) regular lovers

i understand the complications of having balloon and light and life on my list, but i struggled with them for a while and in the end i came to have a very simple standard: it must be "new." that is why you don't see movies like india (which, for the first time, screened in chicago thanks to ccf) that would otherwise have made my list.

haven't yet seen that could make it:
i don't want to sleep alone
redacted
terror's advocate
panoramas of the moving image
no end in sight
there will be blood
4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days
the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford
13 lakes and 10 skies
persepolis
funny games

Paranoia in Recent Hollywood Movies

+ Yesterday I saw 28 Weeks Later, 1408 and A Mighty Heart. Taken in a different order, A Mighty Heart then 28 then 1408, they could be seen as Pre-Apocalyptic, Apocalyptic, and Post-Apocalyptic. These three movies might as well be a good representative sample of the current state of Paranoia in America Movies. I didn't do a body count, but with the hundreds of gunned down and/or ravaged bodies in 28 Weeks Later, the 1, but qualitatively heavy death-omen in A Mighty Heart and the 20+ remembered deaths from 1408, Death, or the fear of it, was THE major subject running through these three films. What does this mean? Politics and dreams crisscross in cinema, and right now the two are mixing into a state of severe paranoia. True, there have always been apocalyptic movies - and I must admit, I do feel better after thinking about the long lineage of these films - but currently this kind of apocalyptic paranoia is finding its way into almost everything. If A Mighty Heart is how we imagine the end of the word beginning - one of our Americans gets kidnapped and killed in the Middle East - and 28 Weeks Later (or Children of Men) is how we imagine it happening - small sects of the pure vs. the infected majority - then 1408 is how we imagine it at the end - being stuck in a nowhere land somewhere between Familiarity and the Other, or American's atheism fighting its agnosticism. 1408 is particularly interesting. For if we take it to be as how death might be, it's a refusal to accept it (Cusak plays a deeply cynical, solipsist) and an acknowledgment that it might exist (through the materiality of the voice recording at the end). Looked at another way, it's an untarnished, pre-911 confidence taking a blow to a post 9-11 half-realization that something else besides us exists, or can effect our existence. But that the movie seems to sit on the fence is a telling indication of the transitional phase we currently find ourselves in as a culture and as a nation in relation to the rest of the world. This all makes me think about this book I read a review for a few years ago that was about how the portrayal of (self)destruction in current hollywood movies marks the beginning of the apocalypse, but I can't remember the name of the book nor can I find the book online. In any case, I would wager that the book might be right.

born in flames

after seeing director lizzie borden's tight working girls, i found born in flames.
and it is awesome.



like working girls, it shares a very grainy, low-budget look at feminist women in new york. but whereas the former has grown softer, the latter still seems edgy and rough. although it can't afford many of the scenes it wants to show, it uses tactics like news reports to indicate the action that's taking place off camera, and, off budget. while important things certainly happen on screen, it's a movie that is mostly dependent on what it can suggest happening off screen. the small group of women featured in the movie (one of them being the director kathryn bigelow) serve as a kind of metonymy for a larger movement happening.

the movie progresses rather anti-climatically (that is until the last shot, which i will talk about in a second). there are instances where you would think you missed something because suddenly a turn of events will have occured without much indication or anticipation. a kind of flippant peripeteia. the main reason for this is probably that the movie feels very patched together, and indeed, it was made in chunks over several years. in the last part of the film the women are shown in a more militant posture. they have guns, and, a bomb. in the last shot of the film a woman drops a bomb in a bag at the world trade center. it blows up. the credits come up.

being that the movie came out in 1983, it couldn't have foreseen what happened to the towers on 9/11, but it certainly anticipates the anger and desperation of the terrorists who were behind it. while the terrorists in born in flames are united states citizens, probably born and raised in nyc, they still want to overthrow the government. this last scene creates a very interesting thought. what if feminists had blown up the world trade center? how would we remember the event today? as a last desperate act for women? would we have sent troops into nyc? we couldn't give them democracy, they already have it. would we imprison all women? in any case, i think the movie, given the events of 9/11, suggests muslim women. it's interesting because there are none in the film, but yet they are some of the most oppressed people in the modern world. yet they didn't blow up the twin towers. men did, as a further act to keep their women oppressed. that's the interesting thing: the women in born in flames blew it up to end oppression, the men in 9/11 did it to further oppress their women.

standford prison experiment part !!

even more interesting footage on youtube:



the remarks about the participants confusing their newfound roles as reality could be seen as what bresson always tried to achieve with his actors.

this is the trailer for the film quiet rage:

standford prison experiment

after hearing someone mention that there is video of the infamous Standford Prison Experiment i went online to discover that not only was there footage but that a movie was in the works by writer christopher mcquarrie, dude who did usual suspects and way of the gun.

the experiment is fascinating because it seems to undermine the popular belief that what we do comes from within ourselves and gives credence to the view that our environment determines how we behave. the people involved in the study were apparently "normal" before the experiment, but once it began they transformed into the roles they were assigned - whether prisoners, prison guards, or the warden, which was actually played by the conductor of the study philip zimbardo. more generally, what this seems to be doing is removing the skin of imperceptibility off of human nature to solve the age old debate of free will vs. determinism - in favor, of course, of the latter.

some video footage that i found on youtube (which is probably from the $100 dollar 60-minute movie quiet rage) is here:


i have read a lot of people complaining about a hollywood production of this event, and my initial reaction was one of aversion, but it does make a lot of sense, whether or not the film makers know why. for one, movies, like their ancestor, plays, are about revealing human nature. they try to see through it and understand it by watching it from a distance. what the experiment did was something similar. it wanted to understand the psychology of roles - how someone takes on a certain behavior in a certain setting. and, they more or less found out that people, in a given situation, will ACT accordingly. in other words, we are all actors, consciously or not. what is interesting about movies is that they are documents of this taken to an extreme. not only are we watching people acting in their every-day lives, but we are also watching them consciously acting, as a job. the latter can bring about reflection of the former, and vice versus.

it's why movies that mix documentary and fiction are the most interesting.