Author Archives: J Caleb Mozzocco

MP3: “Blue Room Light” by Tara Jane O’Neil

Local musicians, these movies could be your lives. In the mid-90s, the writing/directing team of Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley created a pair of films set in the indie music world of low-paying shows, tour woes and fickle fans, each exploring big dreams on open roads and each arriving at very different destinations.

The latter was lensed while the pair were touring Spain with the former, and Tuesday saw them both released on a two-film DVD. To mark the release, the films themselves are going on tour, and this Thursday night they’ll play as a double feature at Carabar in Columbus Ohio. The Parsons Avenue club might not be the ideal venue for taking in a film, but the clientele are likely to appreciate the films more than most—in general, the closer you are to the sorts of scenes depicted in the films, the more you’ll dig them.

First up is 1994’s Half-Cocked, a gritty, grainy, black-and-white film that has the lived-in, lo-fi aesthetic of Clerks, but is much more natural and much less affected (that is, everyone in it doesn’t talk like Kevin Smith writes).
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In Mary Jordan’s documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, we learn that John Waters genuflects before the titular artist, Andy Warhol said he was the only person he’d ever try to copy, and that half of the rock videos we see today look like what Jack Smith was doing 40 years ago.

So how come so few of us know just who the hell this Jack Smith character is?

Jordan’s delirious, half-hypnotic portrait provides the answers.

Smith was an important figure in the New York underground art scene of the 1960s. He was a photographer who specialized in DIY baroque exotica, pictures that looked like stills from a movie that didn’t really exist. He was an experimental filmmaker who embraced color and old Technicolor Hollywood for inspiration. And he cultivated his friends and models into art scene “superstars.”

As one talking head says, Smith was the real Warhol.
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Steven Soderbergh has publicly joked that he pitched The Good German to Warner Brothers as “the first feel bad World War II” movie, and he couldn’t have asked for better source material than Joseph Kanon’s 2001 novel of the same name.

Kanon’s novel, set in Berlin just after the conclusion of European hostilities (Japan is still fighting in the Pacific theater), as Britain, Russia and the U.S. are about to sit down to split up the spoils, is a sort of bleak murder mystery. A murder mystery in which the scene of the crime, Berlin, is also the victim and the killer.

While Soderbergh and screenwriter Paul Attanasio follow Kanon’s basic plot, in which uniformed U.S. war correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney) combs the rubble for lost lady friend Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), stumbling into his country’s race with Russia to scoop up Nazi scientists, The Good German is more an adaptation of World War II-era filmmaking (and homage to Soderbergh’s favorite movies of the period) than any one particular story.
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I realize that pop culture’s patience to celebrate nostalgia grows shorter with each passing decade, but I think it’s still a little too early to look back fondly on the late ‘90s and revel in their spirit.

Sadly, neither VH1 nor writer/director Joe Carnahan seem to agree with me. The former has given us I Love the ‘90s clip shows, and the latter has given us a “Wow, wasn’t Pulp Fiction the greatest? I bet I could make a movie with clever dialogue and seedy criminals that’s just like that! Only different!” style film, of the sort that we (thankfully) haven’t seen much of in this decade.

Carnahan, whose previous work includes effective police melodrama Narc and little-seen Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, is clearly channeling his inner Tarantino. But his film is as much of a mildly retarded Ocean’s Eleven knock-off as it is a Pulp Fiction wannabe.
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There are a couple of different typical approaches to creating a film fantasy.

There’s the straightforward cinematic escapism, in which the audience experiences a distracting reality completely unconnected to their own. Think of the early Disney animated features, or, more recently, the Conan movies, Willow or Star Wars.

There’s escapism as part of the story itself, in which the protagonists escape the many problems of a mundane world that looks an awful lot like ours by traveling to a magical world in which they exert more control over their destinies. Think The Labyrinth, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (or, as I like to call it, CoN:LWW), or the Harry Potter movies.

There’s the symbolic fantasy, in which a story seemingly unconnected to the real world features characters and actions that form an allegory that comments on the events of the audience’s world, like the Lord of the Rings movies, or MirrorMask.

And then there’s what Guillermo del Toro does in Pan’s Labyrinth, blending all of these techniques in an effort not only to address the real world, but attack it.
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Zhang Yimou’s post-Crouching Tiger reinvention of himself as the foremost maker of prestige kung fu flicks continues apace with Curse of the Golden Flower, a royal melodrama that mixes the spectacular visuals and national myth-mining of his more recent House of Flying Daggers and Hero with the dramatic focus and claustrophobic settings of his Raise the Red Lantern.

Like House, it is an almost hypnotically gorgeous-looking film, one that demands not only to be seen on the big screen, but that you not look away from that screen for a second (And no, I don’t think I’m exaggerating).

It’s set in the tenth-century Forbidden City, seat of power to the Chinese emperor. Essentially, it’s a palace the size of a city, with so many servants (all of whom are played by beautiful actors and actresses) and so much intricate set dressing (every scene positively drips with bling) that it makes the Versailles of Marie Antoinette look modest; if Sofia Coppola’s movie seemed to be set in a castle made entirely out of petit fours, Curse seems to be set in a city made out of repurposed Faberge eggs.
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The world ends not with a bang but a whimper in Children of Men. Mysterious worldwide infertility has effectively rendered humanity unable to reproduce for 18 years, and by the year 2027, our species has pretty much thrown its hands up in the air and resigned itself to extinction.

Director Alfonso Cuarón and a small army of screenwriters (including Cuarón himself) adapt author P.D. James’ 1993 novel into a cinematic vision of the future that’s as stomach-churning as it is real-feeling. That’s because there’s so little fantasy involved; aside from the female infertility, the styles of automobiles look a little different, computers have gotten thinner and smaller and we’ve found new ways to advertise products, but little else seems to have changed since 2006.

Sure, London is a graffiti-covered, yellow-tinted urban nightmare of barking dogs and bobbies in riot gear, but so many of the images Cuarón gives us are present and past, not future—scenes of a military camp where caged prisoners wear Abu Ghraib hoods and are menaced by German shepherds a la the U.S. terror prisoner scandals, piles of burning animal corpses in the English countryside as per the millennial hoof-and-mouth epidemic, plus refugee camps filled with desperate people reduced to throwing rocks, dreadlocked activists in the streets, religious fanatics with their misspelled signs…about the only comforting distance between the dying world on the screen and the dying world outside the theater is that ours can still make babies. For now.
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T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest month, but he was a poet rather than a film critic, and thus he never endured weeks of January releases.

Hollywood’s annual dumping ground, January is where the movies with no hope of winning awards or making summer blockbuster bucks are banished to. For the films, January is one step up from sitting on a studio shelf forever; for the film critics, it’s one step up from being in hell (which, incidentally, only plays movies which originally opened in January).

I think that may be why the last weeks of December and the first week of January is why you see so many top ten and best of the year lists from critics and commentators. It’s not just that they need something to fill up magazine, newspaper or website space while they blow off work for the holidays (though there’s some of that too), but rather that they’re stealing themselves for what January will bring them. Looking back at and remembering all of the great films that came out in the previous year gives them the strength they need to face another year.

So as we prepare for Codename: The Cleaner, Happily N’Ever After, Primeval, The Hitcher and Epic Movie, lets take the opportunity that this annual ritual provides to remind ourselves that for every Pink Panther and Big Momma’s House 2, there’s also a Clean.

In alphabetical order, here are my favorite movies from 2006:
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