what i've been watching: february

Paranoid Park: (2007. dir: Gus Van Sant) I have a memory of driving to the first Lollapalooza festival with my boyfriend and his college roommate, who was from Bellingham. When he found out I was from Portland he said, "How could you ever leave?" and launched into a deleriously romantic love-speech about a place he'd never been but planned to live as soon as he could manage it. The Portland in his head bore small resemblance to the city I knew because he'd learned it from Van Sant films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, and so was a sort of paradise for the youthful, unkempt and disenfranchised. And now it probably is that, and Van Sant probably had a lot to do with it.

Paranoid Park unites this Punkerliebe thread with another running through the director's work: the Gerry / Elephant / Last Days use of a true-life tragedy through which he enters the psychological states of those involved. He launched into these low-budget psyche-forays on the heels of Good Will Hunting, Psycho, and Finding Forrester, by which time I was good and ready to write him off as useless and done. For all the strangeness and flaws of this later "Death" trilogy, it was a brave and soul-saving direction to take. Last Days in particular I found electrifying, the only convincing portrait of a suicide I've ever seen.

This one is humbler, with the feel of a short story padded into novella length. It also feels like Van Sant's paean to the beauty of skatepunk culture, reminiscent in its slow-paced lyricism of those old Bruce Weber canticles to glorious masculinity Let's Get Lost and Broken Noses. He uses all non-actors, none of whom feel comfortable in front of the camera, but it will no doubt strengthen the appeal to the youthful disenfranchised to whom he is addressing the piece. The brilliant experimenting he's been doing with ambient sound is here but seems randomly placed, like filler, whereas in Gerry it heightened the sense of danger and the terrible smallness of a human before nature, and in Last Days it served as an unequivocal portal into the head of the suicide.

In short, it's not the most interesting thing he's done, but it will exert an unending pull on a particular demographic, taking its permanent place on the shelf next to Dogtown and Z-Boys and Tony Hawks games, the shelf with the Rebel Skates stickers plastered over it.





The Visitors: (2003. dir: Richard Franklin) >SPOILER ALERT< Australian outing in which Radha Mitchell is attempting a round-the-world solo in a boat with just a cat, an increasingly distant relationship by radio with her fiance, and her own hallucinations to keep her company. It's a great idea, following the intricate entanglement of hallucination and reality of an isolate at sea, but it comes to nothing. All she does is work out the inner demons with mum and da, both recently deceased, and decide to chuck the cheating, patronizing man who's holding her back. Ho hum. The best things about it are the camerawork and the cat, who speaks with a palpably supercilious British sneer.





Australia: (2008. dir: Baz Luhrmann) Yeah, we saw it. We saw it in the theatre. We saw it THE VERY NEXT NIGHT after seeing Synecdoche, New York, and that's a double feature that'll curl your damn toes.

It's not just dreadful, Australia, it's three damn hours' worth of dreadful. Shameless. Shameless. Its very shamelessness is what keeps you from throwing your rotten produce at the screen... that and Luhrmann's obvious deep heart-love of the project. He loves it! He does. You can feel it. Like Miss Amelia's inexplicable love for Cousin Lymon in the Ballad of the Sad Cafe. I read somewhere, and I wish to God I could remember where because a truer thing has never been said about ANY film EVER, how Australia the Movie runs at the audience with arms flung wide yelling love me! love me! Even as we were walking home from the theatre I could feel it tugging at our coats. Is there anything else I can do for you? steamy romance? Jackman wet and half-naked? adorable kid whose mother tragically dies saving his life? wartime separating lovers? shine your shoes? scrub your lintels? how about a fourth hour of unrelenting sentimentality, sweeping music, doctored landscapes and heartstring-tugging?

I've seen it defended as a Tribute To Old Films, to which I reply that the road to the deepest circles of hell is paved with lame-assed rationalizations, and this movie is probably forced viewing on that particular trip, now that I think about it. Nicole Kidman, bless her heart, throws herself headlong into a truly terrible role. The first half is like the worst parts of old studio comedies without any of the good stuff: the strong actress forced into a buffoonish stereotype, plenty of charmless banter, the vulgar but lovably masculine lower-class stud ready to take his rightful place as boss of her while claiming he wants nothing but independence, the adorable and clever orphan teaching her the ways of maternal love. Then, when you think you're free, the movie starts OVER again as an amalgam of the Sundowners and Pearl Harbor, and I'm not certain, but I think it never did end. I think it's still going. Maybe I'm still sitting in that theatre, and this is all a psychotic break, a futile dream of escape like in "Occurence at Owl Creek".

On the other hand, if this film is so bad, why is it conjuring up echoes from literature I admire? In its favor, and I say this with halting speech punctuated by long, Pinter-y pauses, when I was six, this would have been my favorite movie. I'd have rolled with its audacious manipulation without resentment, revelled in the airbrushed beauty of the outback and the truly jaw-dropping glamor of its stars, fallen madly in love with that little boy, laughed, cried, and my poor, saintlike mother would have had to take me to see it over and over.

If you're over seven, though, give it a miss. Or anyway, take along your compost.