ten good things returns (february 2007)
hi folks... so, i guess december and january's editions of this have bitten the dust. i'm gonna try to get back to doing this monthly again though, and i've been brainstorming things to mention for a while now (some of the following is old news in real life, actually)... anyway...
10.
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10.
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truth be told, i've had one of the worst weeks of recent memory myself (thanks to an astoundingly bad bit of work-related drama that i will refrain from complaining about around here), and i wrote this to kinda blow off steam. i just finished a painting, so i couldn't guilt my way out of livejournal for once. so it's good to hear that people are reading and enjoying it. sorry to hear about cornell... sounds like there's been some quasi-good news along with the bad though, right?
i hear you completely about iraq in fragments. it's the first of those documentaries that i've seen where the non-western two cents isn't used to parrot the arguments of the american left. i remember when watching control room, i kept feeling like the interviews seemed somehow cherry-picked to make al jazerra seem like they've been out canvasing for moveon.org, or whatever (and where was the duscussion of iran? or israel? but i digress...) iraq in fragments was almost suspiciously movie-like. especially the first sequence with the sunni boy in baghdad. i kept waiting for someone to turn to the camera and tell him to get the hell out of there (or for longley to simply intervene as that kid's uncle became more and more brutal... but i guess empathy is a tricky thing with stuff like that).
as i said before, definitely keep going with the spike lee segments. unless you're real familiar with the history of new orleans. for me those latter two parts were pretty illuminating.
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I surprised myself by enjoying Rivette at all, seeing how given I am to heaviness and grotesquerie and suffering (in films) rather than lightness and pleasure. I'm more drawn to Bela Tarr than to, I don't know, Jacques Tati. I'm not sure what you mean by Rivette's ability to withstand pleasure, though I like the sound of the phrase--his ability to put pleasure on the screen and not squelch it with something else?
Wasn't it made to be shown on television? Don't you wish there was a TV channel that showed just a couple of things: Out 1, in nightly segments, not all together in one mega-sitting, and Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz in nightly segments, and maybe that Paris Commune film in half-hour nightly segments, to take the place of the evening news...
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i guess i'm shocked by how long rivette can maintain the same feeling, or the same structure of enjoyment, or something. it really does remind me of the way kids play-- there's something about a film like out 1 that kind of reminds me of the way a child will repeat a phrase over and over, until it becomes a song... and then a sound... and then annoying... and then exhausting. rivette seems to possess a childlike endurance for maintaining novelty in a situation. and i think that's one of the reasons his films feel so weird.
i would love to watch that t.v. station. now, if it could only play satantango and syberberg's hitler as well. if some attractive person could appear on-screen and read hegel to me, i wouldn't argue with that either (though i'd probably flip the channel and end up watching 20 minutes of deal or no deal, like i'm sad to say i did tonight)...
actually, sometimes i like the mega-screening approach-- when it involves leaving my house-- because once i'm *actually in the theatre* i've committed. there's no pause button, emails to check, etc.
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