Stop Making Sense is, and this is not nearly as common and ubiquitous a statement as you might imagine, a truly singular film experience. Sure, there are great concert films; Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is very likely a superior concert film with more to say about the nature of music as it exists in the ether. But Stop Making Sense isn’t a concert film, at least in the traditional sense. It is a film about cinema, and about what cinema can do to transform the ethos of a concert beyond what a concert is in person. If this extends it beyond the realm of a concert, it also does more to make us think about what a concert entails as a realm for voyeurism and socio-spatial art. Stop Making Sense does not merely hit the mark for a concert film; it transforms it. Continue reading
One More Music Movie: Stop Making Sense
Leave a reply
How does one approach the colossal elephant in the room that is Showgirls? Outside of perhaps Battlefield Earth, it may be the most lambasted and popularly despised film of the past quarter-century. At the time of its release, it was an unmitigated commercial disaster (unmitigated commercial disasters being the unofficial theme of the film year that was 1995), and to this day it almost universally reviled. Those that don’t revile it, a group that includes a heavy swath of more youthful critics and viewers who indulge in the film for its unapologetic descent into high camp and subversive anti-populism, mark it as some sort of misunderstood modern masterpiece. It is a deeply confusing film that openly solicits both interpretations with arms wide open and no concern whatsoever that its two guests have opposite aims and hate each other. But that is Paul Verhoeven for you folks, and whatever you think of Showgirls, it is probably, for better or worse, the culmination of everything he stands for. It is nothing less than The Paul Verhoeven film. 
The Wages ofFear, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s famed French-Italian white-knuckle thriller was and is almost incomparable as an exercise in hair-raising. It is so well edited, choreographed, acted, and composed that one almost wishes to reduce it to the level of thriller alone (not that, with this skill, it would be “reducing” per-se). Yet Clouzot was not, nor was he ever, simply content to thrill. His scabrous films simply used the conventions of thriller cinema to chill to the bone, to indict and valuate, to scare, to hope, and to leave nothing in their wake. His 1953 work is absolutely one of the most thrilling films ever released, yet this does the texture of the piece a disservice. If it is Hitchcockian, and Hitch is the director Clouzot is almost always compared to, then it evokes Hitch on all his levels, not simply thrilling but tacitly provoking and confronting society’s very base construction and the nastier aspects of the human condition under a thin membrane of sharply composed set pieces. 
Ahh, the biopic. Lionizing and valorizing when you ought to humanize and critique, you are the greatest filmic manifestation of the hyper-individualist tendencies of modern America society which favor a view of the world where-in individuals are its chief agents. You emphasize not the complicated and conflicting causation of change in society, but the “greatness” of certain individuals who can rise above others and lead. As a result, you tend to see something innately compelling about individuals and displace how these individuals developed in the first place, what social factors drove their development. If you are particularly adventurous, you will pay lip service to how complicated and flawed these individuals can be in secret, but nothing more.
Martin Scorsese’s lived-in film adaptation of The Band’s legendary, star-studded farewell concert, cheekily titled “The Last Waltz”, is wholly at odds with the fundamental logic of the conventional concert film, and it is all the more fascinating for it. At the eve of their dissolution, Scorsese chose to film the Band warts and all. He captures, more than anything, their own distance from the music they no longer necessarily want to call home. You can feel his love for the energy of raw music, yet he uses this energy to capture a fundamental malaise. His camera becomes their most knowing fan, giving the film a live, human physicality even as it deals in the deadened decay of men too tired to care anymore. The Rolling Stones’ documentary Gimme Shelter, itself fairly stunning, is haunting for the way a single tragedy intervened and permeated the celluloid of the whole film. Here, however, we come to understand something more deadening: the perpetual tension of joy and melancholy of life on the road, something a tragedy wouldn’t so much break-up as become one small portion of. On this tension between the lively and the embalmed, the film presents a fascinating vision of humanity and performance equaled by few films. 
The significant resurgence of the Western genre since about 2005 (for reasons I’m not entirely sure of) is one of the few truly surprisingly revelations from the cinematic world to be found this past decade. It’s all the more notable particularly because the Westerns themselves have taken so many different forms, from pure, effervescent myth-making, to black-hearted heaving gasps of grimy moral decay, to slowly gliding, almost Impressionist location tapestries where characters serve merely as extensions of the environment, to plain ol’ rootin-tootin shoot em’ up character studies.
Updated mid-2015
This being the first in a month-long film noir review series. 
Was there ever a better cinematic pairing than Nicolas Cage and Werner Herzog? Well, Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog, but here I sense a second coming. The H-man was always obsessed with something, anything, even obsession, and Cage also plays his roles with an unhinged, wild-man version of obsession, even if recently it’s been obsession for paychecks so he can go trampoline in a castle somewhere. And here they’ve produced the kind of film that wouldn’t be more appropriate anywhere than on a screen in front of said trampoline, ready to give you a splitting headache or cast you into the stratosphere. I’m not sure which.
The Long Take 