"Pauline Kael said it was 'meditative', but I fell asleep."

i liked mirror too

otoh:

tarkovsky movies i have dozed off at least slightly at some point in their duration —

mirror
andrei rublev
solaris
stalker

tarkovsky movies i remained conscious throughout their entire duration —

the sacrifice

so, you know, even i don't really trust my opinions on tarkovsky

(i mean if i tried to think about him at all hard, i think i would be hovering around the idea that boredom is sometimes necessary and even aesthetically interesting, which is tbh what this whole sub-stratum of narrative film the thread's defining is about right? ... right?)

to me there is a difference between interesting boredom (sounds contradictory, but i think its true) and frustrating boredom. frustrating boredom is when i'm irritated and just not going with the flow of the movie at all and i'm just like wtf is wrong with these characters and why is this even happening (e.g. synecdoche, ny). interesting boredom is when nothing is happening, but i'm in love with the place that i'm in while nothing is happening, its like being at a boring nightclub vs being at a boring beach.

i watched a 4-hour japanese movie about upskirts and boners yesterday

I'll be watching this too, soon. Am I going to want my four hours back?

meditative? more like sed(it)ative!

otm! these kinds of movies are some of my favorites not because they're "difficult" but because they're the opposite, like people-watching somewhere just hanging out. xx-post

xp karl: yeah, I found Inland Empire to be an example of frustrating boredom - that didn't result in any sort of pay off. Haneke is the pro of frustrating boredom with pay off.

i felt almost the exact opposite. Lynch basically always has payoff for me big time, whereas Haneke sometimes comes across as so moralizing and smug i just want to die (really thinking of seventh continent here, i liked funny games and cache)

though i can understand why someone wouldn't like inland empire. i guess i just love lynch no matter what, idk, its not like i can really explain why anyone should like it, but i don't think its empty.

to me there is a difference between interesting boredom (sounds contradictory, but i think its true) and frustrating boredom. frustrating boredom is when i'm irritated and just not going with the flow of the movie at all and i'm just like wtf is wrong with these characters and why is this even happening (e.g. synecdoche, ny). interesting boredom is when nothing is happening, but i'm in love with the place that i'm in while nothing is happening, its like being at a boring nightclub vs being at a boring beach.

qft, and beautifully put (though i liked synecdoche)

xp karl: I can see where you're coming from re Haneke and Lynch. I think it's just a difference in sensibility. I just don't have a lot of patience for what I see as Lynch's gratuitous surrealism, and maybe it's because I'm not a strong proponent of that style/aesthetic.

I loved pretty much every movie Lynch made up to, say, 1995, but his newer stuff kinda bores me for some reason. Inland Empire was a rare example of a Lynch movie I couldn't finish watching.

xpost: yeah, understandable. though tbh i don't really associate lynch with other surrealists. i'm not in love with surrealism as a whole, but i have infinite patience for lynch, can't say why exactly, i'd have to think about it.

i don't think haneke ever does this.

or lynch tbh

true.

I think I love most of the movies on this thread. I like to wrassle with unwieldy cinema.

― bad crack (Eric H.), Saturday, July 4, 2009 9:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too. only thing is i HAVE to do it in the cinema. on home video i just cannot stay focused. too many distractions.

on the rare occasion that lynch draws out a scene to great length his intention is to draw out the dread and anxiety inherent in the scene and draw out your inner fears.

xpost

me too. only thing is i HAVE to do it in the cinema. on home video i just cannot stay focused. too many distractions.

― Michael tapeworm much talent for the future (s1ocki), Sunday, July 5, 2009 5:52 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is exactly my problem and why i have never gotten through andrei rublev even though i know i would love it

I'm the reverse -- sitting through long, slow movies in the theater is too distracting -- the other people, the fact I can't smoke or eat whatever I want, etc.

Jeanne Dielman video cooking contest!!!

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1223

omg

i have to enter this

i make a dope meatloaf and i have watched this entire movie so

just don't turn tricks. Someone will suffer.

can i stab someone?

*SPOILER*

Oh darn it.

After suffering through Liverpool, it dawned on me that my days of tolerance for this sort of movie may finally be reaching an end.

Of course, it could be the whole home video thing s1ok referred to above. Maybe in a theater I'd have found the thing as transplendent as most everyone else whose opinions I usually respect did.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=4476
http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2009/09/liverpool.html
http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/85797/liverpool.html

The title to this thread is funny because it's this type of shit that Pauline Kael would call out for being full of hot air 9/10 times. I also wonder if she ever got lazy enough to call any movie "meditative."

otm

apparently for kael, "meditative" = satyajit ray

The rhythm of his films seems not slow but, rather, meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on.

-- 3/17/73, on Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest

Ray gives the action the distilled, meditative expressiveness that he alone of all directors seems able to give

-- 11/10/75, on Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder

Haha. Thank you.

exactly what "sort" of movie, Eric? I wasn't thrilled w/ Liverpool but thought it was OK.

btw that Kael mini-reviews site has been taken down on Geocities.

(I mean, somehow Esther Kahn didn't make you want to go comatose)

EK had a plot, of sorts.

Again, this might be in part ugly video screener getting in the way. If there's something going on in the cinematography of Liverpool, I was blinded to it.

Was just thinking of recording Old Joy, coming up on TV next week, but then I saw the word "meditative" and thought of this thread.

maybe "meditative", but hardly boring. it's good, watch it!

This week I watched a couple of movies that fit this thread. L'avventura and Dead Man. Both had promising openings but were on the boring side tbh.

I've seen films by both those directors that were much more boring.

Ha.

I once scared off a guy who was trying to pick me up at a National Gallery screening by saying that anyone who preferred Lizaveta Markova to Valley of the Bees was prizing quantity over quality.

If I had tried to watch Silent Light in a theater, rather than on DVD, I'm sure I would have walked out in exasperation. And I DID walk out of The Tree of Life--the cosmos-and-dinosaurs sequence was great, but YET ANOTHER sequence establishing that Brad Pitt's character was disappointed with his life, and taking it out by being an exceptionally strict father....

Silent Light is deadly and has stopped me from checking out anything else by Reygadas to date.

Walking out of The Tree of Life because it was too heavy handed about Brad Pitt being disappointed with his life and taking it out on his family is seriously hilarious and WTF to me.

Search: Marguerite Duras' India Song and The Truck
― Ken L (Ken L), Friday, May 20, 2005 11:32 AM (9 years ago)

Saw India Song last night. Viscerally hated it. I was in such a hurry to vacate the theatre, I forgot my sunglasses. I'm all for Jeanne Dielman and Satantango; this was brutal.

That was the most difficult movie I've ever sat through, with the possible sole exception of a Scottish documentary on healing waters

Still kind of wonder if S. Ray was just some sort of exceptional outlier in Kael's viewing history.

More so than RW Fassbinder?

Was gonna say, at least there is the diva worship, but ...

Actually, going by India Song, I'm astounded she reviewed Le Camion so positively. I don't know, maybe they're very different. If they're not...India Song struck me as "The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" turned into a movie.

The Apu films strike me as pretty close to Truffaut in tone. (Why I'm baffled that Truffaut was so condescending towards Pather Panchali.)

After re-listening to that Kael-McDonald-Simon recording from '63 again, it seems to me there were a lot of defenders of western civilization that were pretty condescending toward Ray.