Film Directors vs. Guns

Yesterday a Palestinian man showed me his feces. It didn't matter that the man was Elia Sulieman, and his feces were a movie called The Time that Remains, it was just as scary as any other time a Palestinian man showed me feces.

I'm not being mean because I actually really enjoyed the movie. In fact, the first 30 minutes were pretty flawless and well exciting. Thats the bits when he talks about the active role that his dad took as a Palestinian nationalist in the early days of the State of Israel. Stirring stuff. But then it all gets a bit off the boil. Bits of it are boring. Bits of it are well over-stylised. But the real problem for me, (or if not a problem, a time bomb), was just how personal this movie is.

About half this movie is shots of Elia Sulieman playing himself but doing an impression of Buster Keaton, and staring at his mother and father and their maid, as they go around their daily chores.

In a way the film is sustained by the setting of it or whatever, because it genuinely is interesting to hear from someone who lives in that area. There's lots of pretty cool visual gags about the dark absurdity of living in Palestine: An Israeli soldier parks outside an Arabic nightclub and bobs his head to the beat while calling curfew. Stuff like that. But that in itself makes you feel even more that this film is immensely solopsistic, as in "How can this guy be banging on about how he feels about his mum and dad when he's in the middle of a fucking warzone."

Which is totally unfair I guess. But you can't help thinking that when you watch the movie. That's all I'm saying.

I've heard people say that there's only so much longer Sulieman can keep doing this Nazarene Buster Keaton schtick. I think the bigger thing is how long cinema, or art cinema anyway, can go on like this. How long can we be so besotted with our directors.

Because this is the most mastubatory piece of cinema ever produced. I'm convinced of that. This is the apex. The man plays himself, in a film about his own life, set in the actual house where he grew up. Its like CCTV footage of his soul. But its the apex of something which started I guess with the Nouvelle Vague and the auteur manifesto. Suddenly directors were allowed to talk about themselves and how they feel the same way that painters had been for years and years. Then really intersting things started happening like the Antoine Doinel series. You watch those movies and you're like "Man this is scary. Truffaut is sitting next to me and shouting about his marital problems."

There are definetly nice things like that in Time that Remains. Like there's this one bit were a guy comes to his door and is like "I got you this Tabbouleh with raisins just how you like it," and we're all like "Woah that really is how he likes it!"

I'm rambling, but the point is maybe that personality and subjectivity, which you probably thought would always be necessarily original and challenging is now itself getting hackneyed. You do watch this movie and think I don't care pal, I don't care.

Or I did. I don't want to tell you how to think. And who cares how I feel about this stuff anyway. I don't even know if you're allowed to call Palestinians douche-bags

Why Mummy is fatter than Daddy.

Just because I spend my time trying on my favourite dresses doesn't mean that I don't hate cry babies. Like, one time I was in the cinema when I got this thick cokey, nosebleed. I looked down and my white shirt was a red shirt. Then this hulk next to me picked me out of my seat, carried me out of the theatre, and dialled an ambulance. I assured him I was fine and walked straight back into the theatre. He made me miss the trailers. I like the trailers because I like to see what's coming soon.

Other crybabies include: Them people who don't eat veal, and the people who get upset about Michael Winterbottom movies.

I went to see that film the Killer Inside Me and I honestly didn't know what all the fuss was about. I mean it is definetly a gruesome film, but this is not like, Gaspar Noe, its not even Tarantino really. There is a scene were Jessica Alba gets her eyes plucked out. Its pretty bad, but I mean just don't go and see the movie you know? The thing that really pissed people off was that the women in the movie seem to enjoy gettin' a rapin'.

Hence the same outcry in the press, that greets every second offering from MW. Bare people walked out of a press screening in Berlin, and apparently some douche bag stood up at the screening at Sundance and shouted "How dare you Sundance."

Which is all fine, apart from the fact that you get the impression that MW loves it. Every time his mid-life crisis flutters into existence, some hack comes out and pens this nonsense melodrama which casts MW as a tartan, Fuckaneer, jamming both barrels into the gob of a Gilbert and Sullivan Appreciation Society treasurer. I mean he must love that you know?

The second thing that comes out of all of this, is that MW gets right on the blower to Newsnight Review or Southbank or something and gets them to give him an interview were he explains to the dumbfound proles that the violence of his movies is loaded with irony or some subtlety which they obviously missed. He gets off scott-free and makes his critics look pretty dim.

So he went on Radio 4 the other day and was like "This film is completely like, unreliable narratory. Ergo, anyone who thinks that the women actually enjoyed the violence or whatever, have totally got the wrong end of the stick. Psyche."

There's two reasons why this is bollocks. One is because, if this is the point of the movie, he's fucked it up. The second is that its a well old idea, and one that didn't need to be done again, because its been done loads by well cleverer people than MW.

The driving thing of the whole film was the schizophrenic behaviour of Lou Ford (the main character played by Casey Affleck) prone to personality shifts (from loveable bumpkin to rapacious nutjob). So MW's point is that we see the rape of the girls purely through his eyes or whatever. But its pretty haphazardly done. The whole thing is riddled with Freudian nudgewinkery and flashbacks. Occasionally there's these real hamfisted bits of fourth wall breaking, when MW asks an otherwise admirable Affleck to mum and gurn at the camera. Its really balls all that side of it actually.

But the point is, its not as interesting or pioneering as MW wants you to think. I just came out of that cinema and wanted to put posters up everywhere telling people to see Detour, Edgar Ulmer's 1945 movie. That's how to do unreliable narrator so that its snappy, and subtle, and absorbing and really, really creepy.

It always feels a bit shit when you hear directors making excuses for their movies. Its especially bad when the movie itself is such a shabby, shit little number.

Joe

My partner is upstairs banging on the floor. He likes to copy David Byrne's dance moves from the live performance of "Once in a lifetime," at Wembley in '82. I go upstairs and promise to do the dances with him as long as he comes with me to watch a triple bill of Weerasethakul Apichatpong movies at our local arty cinema. He agrees. Off we go.

You might say a triple-bill is a big thing to give to a gay, Thai, part-time architect of tender years. But you're forgetting that he just won the Palme D'Or silly. This is our cinema's way of giving him a party. After seeing those films I'd want to give him lots of parties.

I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. I've never been so struck by the sound of the movies. Each film, Blissfully Yours, Syndromes and a Century and Tropical Malady, each has this background hum of insects right across the whole soundtrack. It feels like you're in a bath. At least that's how I remember it. Meanwhile the the shyly smiling voices of the shy protagonists, hardly creep above the sound of the cricketing. Very quietly they tell each other that they love each other.

In Apichatpong movies, people love each other very quietly, and very much. And the sex scenes are so honest so tender, that its difficult not to think of them as anything but wholesome, sort of hopeful. Tropical Malady makes you forget that people ever thought homosexuality was bad, that people ever could. The heartbreaks are quiet and polite. In Syndromes and a Century, Mr. Chai explains to Dr. Prasarn that he is in love with her, but listens patiently as she recounts the moment she fell in love with another man. Even the conflicts (like the doctor patient conflicts that begin each film) are brushed away with tact and smile.

And they smile. People smile in Apichatpong movies. And little bad things happen. Cows die and people get rashes. But I don't think any big bad things could really happen.

The visual composition is the same: Soft and unassuming and green and meek and quietly moving. The characters gaze at the treetops and at the scorching Thai sky, and you gaze with them. You look at peoples faces for minutes, but it doesn't feel fair that you can't touch them, comfort them. And its all like pea green, pea green, pea green.

This is the overriding affect. You know the way you feel that exciting, voyeuristic ripple when you watch a Haneke film, the feeling that you shouldn't really be seeing all of this? The opposite affect comes from Apichatpong movies. There is this quiet, naive honesty to them, like standing next to a very shy, very lovely person, who is quietly explaining to someone that they are in love.

On the way out of the cinema my partner makes jokes about the unpronounceability of his name (is it "Achtung Ouijaboard?") I'm just excited to see this latest one. I mean its supposed to be his best film yet. Its sure to be lovely. Just lovely.

On watching the queue for Godard's "Socialism" at the Cannes Palais

Berlin is like the coolest place in the world these days, and London still has the coolness of the nineties, but Paris will always be cool as long as people still watch Bout de Souffle. I dig that, I just don’t get why people are so serious about those movies.

For instance for the people standing in line at the Cannes Palais on the Boulevard de la Croisette, waiting to see Godard’s latest (last?) offering Socialism, JLG is the man with the supersonic penis. He hunts the big ideas, gets them in range and blows them to bits with his penis. His penis is the strongest thing in the wimpy world of art cinema, and, these people say:

“We need Godard to kick the shit out of the ignorant West. We need him to blow King Kong, and consumerism and Keanu Reeves through a brick wall.”

I want to say again that it would be churlish and sort of adolescently iconoclastic to say that Godard’s movies weren’t exciting and cool and great when I watched them, and Jesus they must have been exciting in the 60s can you imagine? Big broken-nosed Belmondo loping alongside the sexiest Seberg of all time. And all of it frenetically cut together, like by a lunatic, with big pictures of Bogie. Wowzer. What I’m trying to say is just this:

Shot some big game once, doesn’t make him a sharpshooter.

Take a practical example. With Bande a Part and Breathless, Godard chopped his films up like no-one had ever seen it before. Its crazy to watch, but it also makes you think about Godard himself, hunched over on a stool somewhere with a pair of scissors, smashing up his own dailies. Nowdays, funky editing styles just make you think of MTV. Besides, in the technology of cinema there was just more to smash up in the sixties. They weren't proper hunters, but more like cider sodden aussies crashing along b-roads in oafish four by fours in search of roos to fender-marmalise.

The main point is this though. Those early new wave efforts were designed, as Susan Sontag said, to destroy the cinema de papa. With its cigarettes and its bollocksed noir, Breathless waseven more than a parody, its was a conscious reduction of everything that cinema had been before, a reduction down to "a gun and a girl." This is were the Cannes Palais crowd underestimate Godard. He wasn't just a gunslinger. He was Shiva. But once you've destroyed everything, you're done.

So I just don’t know if Godard should still be making movies. The great destroyer doesn't have anything to destroy and besides, he doesn't even know whats already been destroyed. The upshot is that he does a bit of a Columbine.

I aint seen it but apparently this Socialism film is going to be impossible to watch. Godard himself basically demanded that non-Francophones who wanted to watch it should "learn French." The idea that a great 60s revolutionary should be making films so brashly undemocratic is a complete capitulation to the criticisms that he always put him self at risk of.

I don’t even know if this is a judgement on his movies, I’m just saying, I don’t understand why I should go and see them. He’s not like a great story teller or anything, he's an iconoclast, and there's nothing more butters than an athritic middle finger. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t get these old guys.