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

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.

A charitable interpretation would be that Truffaut felt threatened by Satyajit Ray, subliminally or otherwise and covered it up by adopting the guise of a stereotypical French snob.

Been trying to put my finger on my problem with PK for a while, think it comes down to something like this. She clearly had a talent for communicating her enthusiasm that is almost, um, seductive, and a way with words, an ability to write well-constructed, memorable sentences in idiomatic English that could run rings, not to mention circles and squares, around most of her contemporaries. But in the end there is some unforgivable flaw in her critical thinking. Perhaps it is because there is some ideal of a well-functioning critical mind, or maybe of any mind, that one has to learn to trust one's instincts but at the same time monitor them with one's analytic mind, to make corrections and provide explanations, to name a few of the many functions involved in this balancing act. Her general approach as I understand it, to watch everything only once, then run home to type out a fever dream to bowl the readers over with an ever more garrulous outpouring of Paulinist Prose (okay maybe there was some editing or revising of the words but not of the opinion), is not really a system, it can't be tinkered with or fixed once it starts misfiring and veering astray. The end result becomes a Cult of Personality of The Gatekeeper, requiring a few well-chosen favorites, old and new, to bestow praise on while others are vilified and not permitted to enter the city walls. As a case in point, maybe if she had anything like a modicum of self-reflection and correction, at least as a critic, she might have recovered from the trauma she experienced when she Went Hollywood and discovered that the Studio Bosses Had No Clothes.

On another note, have you guys heard that My Favorite song that references Hiroshima Mon Amour?

"Burning Hearts" is what it's called. Kind of amazing, ineffable. Art-damaged, Smiths-damaged Long Island kids reimagine fallout-damaged star-crossed lovers as first imagined by imperialism-damaged cinema-saving French aesthetes.

But perhaps I am overrating. Unlike PK, or at least my impression thereof, if I have even the slightest sense of having overpraised something, then according to some variant of Newton's Third Law I have to push in the other direction and distance myself from it.

Kael was ultimately incurious in a distressing way

applaud her for smelling out Celine & Julie tho

That's a more concise way to put it

I prefer to regard her as Gore Vidal's Burr did John Adams: what he knew he knew well; what he didn't he could hardly imagine.

She's one of the great essayists of the century more than a mobie writer.

If they're not...India Song struck me as "The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" turned into a movie.

Sorry what does this mean?!

Love to watch The Truck someday..

Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party was famous dismissive PK put down of most Euro art film, clevering smiting at least two giants, Bergman and Antonioni, along with various fellow travelers, with one blow. This is implicitly in opposition to her love and approval of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang "vital" life-affirming cinema.

Keep in mind that she adored L'Avventura and praised several Bergman films after the essay, notably Shame and The Magic Flute. How La Notte and L'Eclisse diluted the first film's legacy she doesn't say since listing their the strengths and flaws require more adumbration than she's willing to give. These days I prefer L'Eclisse myself because it's zippier and faster and Alain Delon.