Dial M for Murder

Hitchcock’s classic works by using dramatic irony like a yo-yo — at one moment we know more than any of the characters, at the next moment less than then; the secret knowledge we know with and over various characters puts us into a strange conspiratorial relationship even with those characters for whom we have very little empathy.   While the use of music and conventional two-shots in the opening sequences was almost too much for me to handle, eventually this conventionality gives way to Hitch’s remarkable ability to use the camera narratively, subtly, and carefully to position us in exactly the position he wants us to be in — sometimes with a vision of insight and sometimes blinded by bedazzlement.

+++1/2

Exit Through The Gift Shop

This documentary refracts its way through a hall of mirrors leading us from Banksy to Thierry Guetta, then from Thierry to Banksy, from Banksy to Thierry to (their sum?) Mr. Brainwash (MBW) —  tracing, all the while, the emergence of a number of different important street artists.  This rollercoaster narrative of post-referential documentation, regardless of its status as a hoax or the documentation of a hoaxter, feels like *both* a respectful introduction to recent street art *and* an erudite commentary on fame-lust and the emptiness of image – consciousness with a lack of commitments to ideas and meanings.

+++1/2

Four.Five.Three.Six.Five

(45365)

The middle of this documentary feels as perfect as a documentary about the-middle-of-nowhere, Ohio could feel — honest, celebratory, meandering, cyclical, beautiful and mundane; and I’m not sure if the feeling I got toward the middle, the feeling that we had run out of time to meander and were now, finally, going to lean into narrative, I’m not sure if that feeling was more about me and my socialization into the conventions of mainstream film? or if the filmmakers actually teased me that maybe a narrative arc of sorts was about to emerge? So quite honestly, I’m not sure if the film didn’t land its ending, or if its ending was just disappointing in precisely the way that life in the-middle-of-nowhere, Ohio actually is:  both possibilities are not only possible but likely.

++++

49 Up

Seven Up

I might never have known about this film had it not been for the achievement of the whole series, but this film is packed with insight and truth that work without any of the other films: it is remarkable how the simple interviews and spare B Roll manages to capture both the universality of childhood hopefulness and playfulness AND how profoundly these children are articulations of large scale social forces (like class) and their own parents ambitions.  The humanity of the children is so powerful that it even transcends (and rejects?) the points that the filmmaker is trying to make; pushing back against the social science that just like the other forces in their lives, attempts to overdetermine them accounding to their demographic categories.

+++++

Law of Desire

 

Almodovar creates a brilliantly poetic, visually delightful, cheekily salacious, generically enigmatic film that braids together two stories:  one story of men who love and desire unavailble others – the other – a brother and his former-brother-now-sister as they try to find a way to reconcile with their past, with their expectations for each other and with their relationship.  The stories-within-the-stories are levels that seem as unexpected and random (initially) as they seem utterly necessary and inter-connected (finally);  this should not be your first Almodovar film, but if you’ve seen a few and liked them, I’ve rarely seen him be more himself than in this film.

++++

Dirty Pretty Things

This social-justice thriller uses international stars and conventional Hollywood Shooting Style (with just a bit of BBC pepper) to both tell a compelling personal story about a victim finding escape and (a little bit) of vengeance and reveal a compelling world where sex-workers, maids, cabbies and sweatshop workers are all undocumented persons and (therefore) far more likely to be drawn into the schemes, appetites and profiteering of the underworld (which are depicted helpfully as an extension of the appetites and consumption of the upper classes).   For a film to do all this is more than laudable, it’s an achievement; the idealist in me wants the film to resist (even more) the neat closure demanded by the mainstream thriller, but ultimately I am grateful for the many ways that the film hews a more difficult middle road both inviting the average movie-goer to care and enjoy and forcing us to confront our own complicity both in lifestyles of entitlement and fantasy.

+++1/2