He Never Died
Henry Rollins casts an almighty pall over He Never Died, a cold splash of a horror film that is more fried, irreverent noir than monster mash. In his music and public persona, the consummate and inimitable madman Rollins sours every heckle, hellhound howl, and vulture screech to an aria of menace and punk-certified nihilism. But, in He Never Died, his viciously, aggressively minimalist performance likens even a simple stare to a barely-sublimated volcano of enthralling agony brewing inside him. Wearing scars like an eldritch horror hiding in a grey hairdo and dad-core attire, he feels like the brutal punk troubadour and restless social freedom fighter beaten into ragged, deeply frayed middle-age. Continue reading
Update 2018: JFK is such a wonderfully misunderstood film, and one that opens itself up so heroically to criticism. For instance, it would fit so well into Frederic Jameson’s analysis of post-modernism as the cultural logic of capitalism, where any semblance of truth, social fixity, or totalizing connection between layers of society is totally unmoored, leading to a dangerous relativism that occludes how capitalism reinforces its own social structures. In this criticism, post-modernism dreams a liberation from the social structures that bind us, a dream that dangerously inclines toward individualistic narratives where we all control our own futures, where no social structures confine us, where truth doesn’t constrain our options and is simply a ruse. The form of relativism JFK traffics in – nothing is true or fixed, everything is a lie, etc – veers toward a vision of uncertainty that would probably veer for Jameson toward hiding, rather than revealing, how capital and the oppression caused by capital is the truth which creates and limits possibility, which master-hands reality, which decides who wins and who loses, etc.
The pictorial inclinations of King Hu’s rhapsodic camerawork in his monumental wuxia epic A Touch of Zen are his film’s most gilded gestures, but they are no mere poetic filigrees. Rather, Hu’s investment in the physical space of his film and the way that a camera and a mind can intake and reform space informs a conscious refusal on the director’s part to explore character drama in a vacuum. Without the crucible of bounding characters by the natural environments that often remain overlooked in the world of cinema, Hu suggests that person vs. person conflict may be tenuous and unresolvable; an understanding of the earth itself it necessary first. The illusory beauty in the frame often suggests a new perceptual realm beyond the typical threshold of human consciousness, as though we are peering into an ethereal plane of color and space that eludes humanity’s typical tasks and goals. Space is otherworldly here, but also tactile, exerting a magnetic pull on the characters who weather through frames as if attracted by the deception of an unknown specter in the air. Or as though they characters were being exhumed from their internal, civilized spaces – and metaphorically the confines of their internal minds – to confront the outside world, to explore new perspectives in a desperate quest for self-actualization. 
Between roughly 1993 and 1998, the post-Tarantino brio that was at one point the most scorching lightning-bolt in cinema shifted to a self-immolating fire, a pox on the cinematic landscape, almost overnight. The beacon of the Weinstein-fronted American independent success story, Tarantino was a shining light on the cinematic landscape until a deluge of golden-child followers (see Boondock Saints) cast their mettle in Tarantino’s gilded name and overindulged in his post-coital cool and sometimes smug pearly whites without actually backing their versions of the tale up with the wit, elan, or the cinematic rattle and hum of Tarantino’s style. Posing had suddenly become an art form.
Released two years after the New Wave volcano of Easy Rider, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop visualizes the tattered remains of America encroaching on its own emptiness after the acid-freakout of ’69 disrupted the old ways and left the scattered ashes of the American populace reaching for new ones. Following two desecrated human carcasses played by James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as they coarse through the crucible of the American road, they search for the contours of a narrative or a life that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. We watch in vain as they grasp onto the only hope they have left: a desperate, disheveled odyssey to find compatriot-combatants to race cars with them into oblivion. Each character wanders around like a James Dean simulacrum searching – literally – for a semblance of the youthful confrontation and auto-shop phallus-comparing that they see as the embodiment of the renegade American Dream. 
Visually garrulous and verbally unobtrusive, Ivan’s Childhood is perhaps the platonic ideal of the director-is-born image, a fully-formed debut for the ages. A film riddled with the ideas that would eventually molt into Tarkovsky’s future six feature films, a diminutive career (seven including this film) by any standards, Ivan’s Childhood lays the groundwork for Tarkovsky’s unmooring of the cinematic consciousness into realms both indescribably beautiful and thoughtfully revelatory. Then again, “eventually” doesn’t do justice to Ivan’s impossible grandeur and fractured intimacy; on its own terms, had the greatest director of the last fifty years not pursued a career in film at all and absconded from sight leaving only this singular mark of his trespass on our earthly realm, he would still be one of the definitive directors of the second half of the twentieth century. 
Edited for Clarity
The cabal of proponents for Martin Scorsese’s most recent Goodfellas retread, The Wolf of Wall Street, dance around the central garrulousness of the film with superficially enticing claims that its engorged, laborious pomposity is tantamount to a claim against head honcho Jordan Belfort and his trying brand of indulgent charisma and hedonistic living. The claim doesn’t hold much water, although Scorsese’s intention may have been to pummel us with the initial sweat glands of living for the moment until our body’s capacity for perspiring freezes over in the thickets of hedonism. It may have been Scorsese’s vision, I might add, because that is exactly what he accomplished many years before with his tempest-as-torpor Goodfellas, a film where every kaleidoscopic camera track and exotic edit attunes us to the characters’ struggles to methamphetamine their lives straight into the hollow caves of an early grave. Over three hours, continual fluxion begets a grave chill as expending energy gives way to perpetual enervation. 
Carl Dreyer’s unerring spiritualism hangs over Ordet like a ghostly pallor, but it does not – as many critics fail to realize – define the film’s essence, at least insofar as the ascetic way many scholars interpret the word “spiritual”. Much like Tarkovsky, who arguably took over the reigns for Dreyer as he was exiting the world himself, Dreyer’s spiritualism was not a nebulous, free-floating nexus of dogma and soul-searching but a physical, tangible expression of living, being, and breathing. Thus, while so many scholars reduce Dreyer to his otherworldly austerity, they fail to glimpse the glimmers and flickers of confrontational, even primal human emotion and active experience radiating within, out of, and beyond the cramped walls of his human locals. 
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film is not his greatest work, but with the weight of his passing hanging over the piece, it emerges as something even more notable, even more trenchant. The Sacrifice remains a foremost reminder that the cinema’s most pressing, most exploratory wanderer left the world the way he would want to: without an answer, still wandering and exploring. For, unlike most of Tarkovsky’s contemporaries (excepting maybe Terrence Malick in America), the Russian poet’s films defy answers, riddles, destinations, or arrivals. They laugh in the face of finalitude, they eschew completeness, they stage a coup against the idea of conclusion because their very caliber as cinema is inextricably tied not to the arrival at knowledge, as every other film stresses, but to mechanisms of knowing and to the experience of feeling. For Tarkovsky, how we sense the world is the divining rod to what we sense. 
The Long Take 