Rat Film

Why, You No-Good Dirty –

The first feature-length work from Theo Anthony, Rat Film [2016] strikes me as one of the great films of the last ten years. Fabulous comprehensive essay in the booklet accompanying the new Memory release on Blu-ray by none other than Baltimore soldier-of-cinema and movie ambassador Eric Hatch, who in a cogent passage writes of the film's hometown premiere at the refurbished (albeit currently shuttered again) Parkway: "an auditorium that visibly preserved multiple layers of decades-past grandeur and decline while feeding present-day gentrification discussions only made more palpable the film's investigative power. ... continually finds new points of view from which to ponder rats, each sparking inquiries into much larger issues." Among these one must obviously count Baltimore's burgeoning rat population; the poverty line; the racial and economic gerrymandering of districts based on class variations; the preponderance of nooses and multiple echoes of their shape and knots; real vs. virtual spaces from the pre-tech-era nevertheless (tunnels and alleys and crawlspaces and backyard-jungle trails) to the present and beyond; and... in moments, hypnosis.... 

Hatch points out the film's "formal risks" and this is no joke: the Google Street View-sourced replication of the city on auto-glide, the opening of the cosmos and the abyss sighted past missing polygons and textures absent in the would-be congruity of an e-Baltimore simulacrum... virus evident in the presence of the disease-ridden rats and geo-re-spatialization clawing at the barrier of Utopia.Two domestics in their owner's living room attempt to grip up or down on the fabric of his clothes, as he sits in this pose on the sofa, his eyes staring directly into the lens. This portraiture interlude might sit clever and stupid in the work of a lesser filmmaker; Rat Film, on the contrary, provides us such moments to ponder the complexity inherent to point-of-view. •

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Writings at Cinemasparagus about the films of Theo Anthony:

Chop My Money [2015]

Peace in the Absence of War [2016]

Rat Film [2016]

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Peace in the Absence of War

Baltimore 2015, 4/27 – 5/2, Encompassing May Day

Baltimore 2015, a few days between the end of April and the start of le joli mai. A mass gathering in a public space hosts an ongoing parade... or a peaceful demonstration? A loudspeaker calls for a celebration free of political trappings or the regular speechifying. (This 'means well.') Police or National Guard are on hand to keep the peace, so to speak — how far we've come in the near decade since this documentation, in that the armed authorities of Theo Anthony's 2016 film look only lightly suited-up pre-Labor Day for potential action/reaction. You can view Anthony's film (5 minutes in length) at his site here, or as an inclusion on the new Memory Blu-ray release of his next picture, the opus Rat Film. •

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Writings at Cinemasparagus about the films of Theo Anthony:

Chop My Money [2015]

Peace in the Absence of War [2016]

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Elvis

"Elvis Was a Hero to Most"

I shared some of the Cinephile-Rock shock when Shout! Factory's Shout Select line bugled a new restoration on Blu-ray of the near-3-hour 1979 made-for-hire TV-movie: Elvis — directed by none-other than Master of Horror John Carpenter, who had just achieved brilliant success with his blockbuster of one year prior, Halloween. Supplements on-disc explain the circumstances around the project's genesis. 

So: Why Elvis? I mean to ask, not so much, why did Presley receive (or project) the mania specific to his prime, but rather, aside from the gyrating pelvis and backbeat knee-bends: Why Elvis?  The black-mascara'd, fairy'ish alien ready to reintroduce (if only subconsciously) a strain of dandyism unique to our American gossamer: a natural outcome following the century's breakthroughs in the novel, poetry, painting, jazz music, and a general avant-garde. The film exists consciously to capitalize not only on "the King"'s 1977 passing but also on the success of 1978's The Buddy Holly Story by Steve Rash.

Carpenter's direction / mise-en-scène in Elvis registers as 'flat' in a good way: Carpenterian straightforwardness, not to a fault. Part of the reason I love John Carpenter comes down to his tendency, or method, of burying the metaphors within the symbols — like, say, in the pleasurable but admittedly demanding works of Wallace Stevens.

The Kurt Russell-starring Elvis is oddly moving, in a way that Baz Luhrmann's recent Elvis vehicle of 2022 can't possibly match given, as it were, the fact that Luhrmann's movie was developed in pure bad faith. Carpenter's version exists now as a picture far superior to the latter-day trash-can Baz-baroque, even on the Russell-level alone: he incarnates the King magnificently, and reminds us just how underrated this performer, a Carpenter fétiche, has been to the mass and cinephile populations over the years. But I could have sworn upon even the opening hour of the film that Russell was doing his own singing vocals, so great is the looping and syncing of the actual and uncanny Ronnie McDowell's belting pitch-perfection. 

Let's refresh our minds with a recent photo of Baz Luhrmann, who in one second given the opportunity would make a musical number out of Oswald's assassination at the pistol of Jack Ruby. •

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More writing on the films of John Carpenter at Cinemasparagus:

Elvis [1979]

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Macunaíma

Follow the Tracks — Sic Transit

In 1969, Macunaíma initiated a new, final, "middle-to-late" period for Joaquim Pedro de Andrade — the films' political subversion stitched loud on their baba-cool sleeves and hems. In the frame posted above, Macunaíma drops from his mother's womb like a... how to put it... 'an adult foal'? Three times throughout the course of the film Macunaíma will be incarnated in different forms, the ink-ling's parallel path through a pathway of political readjustment in the modern flux of Brazilian society. As already mentioned, the picture is an entry into the "politically subversive" movie of the late-'60s —a trend grandfathered in by Godard's 1967 La chinoise and Weekend — replete with a wild beautiful color palette, a dubbed audio track, bright Klieg éclairage, 'tableaux' compositions, and the plausibility of cannibalism metaphorical and literal.

Consonant with that last aspect, Macunaíma further exemplifies the era's political strain countered by surrealism. When springtime hits 'the hero,' Macunaíma turns white and takes more immediate and tangible control of the anarcho-disruptive cell to which he belongs. This 'Brazil of the imagination,' full-flow tropicalia, remains to this day Joaquim Pedro's most popular film; its US Blu-ray release from Kino initially appeared as a standalone disc; shortly thereafter, they released a 3-Blu set that includes Macunaíma along with the rest of his entire body of work. Why buy one film, when for slightly more dollars you can have the complete works? •

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My Writings on the Complete Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

(This 3-disc Blu-ray set was issued by Kino in 2018.)

O poeta do Castelo [The Poet of Castelo, 1959]

O mestre de Apipucos [The Master of Apipucos, 1959]

Couro de gato – (La peau du chat) [Cat Skin, 1960]

Garrincha, alegria do povo [Garrincha: Joy of the People, 1963]

O padre e a moça [The Priest and the Girl, 1965]

Cinema Novo [1967]

Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova [Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City, 1968]

Macunaíma [1969]

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Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City

All Mod Cons

Ever wonder what the story is with that spot in Brazil with the name? You need look no further than Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City [Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova, 1968]. The year prior, the Italian manufacturer and industrial design firm Olivetti commissioned Andrade to make a documentary portrait of the pre-planned city-in-progress, known from before its 1960 construction as "Brasilia." Note the hopeful, utopian ring to the name — if it sounds at all naïvely paradisiacal, that's because it was intended by the civil bureaucratchiks to signal to the people a place conceived as the modern metropolis, one in immediate congruence with the electro-technical times. Over a short span, however, the new capital Brasilia came more to reflect any other city's struggle in maintaining equilibrium among the classes, serving as an environmental/ambient eradication-zone intended to quash class and economical differences across-the-board. In fact, as experienced by all states which eventually give up on 'big ideas' (washing their hands of a Brasilia's now all-but-obvious infeasibility), the project metamorphosed less into "Ys" than into a gilded Potemkin village. And maybe Olivetti had some stake in its progress, or in the propaganda that might keep it at least a semi-functioning, or exploitable, asset. So their man Joaquim Pedro takes to the ground with camera in hand, and the producers are taken aback by this film whose title promises "contradictions."

Raul Marques on Letterboxd wrote: "Ingeniously starts out as a straight-up propaganda for the modernist utopia of a planned metropolis then proceeds to increasingly deconstruct itself to reveal the cracks in the concrete sand castle. Slips at affirming the almost immaculate qualities of the city's design, yet correctly addresses the inescapability of the country's issues independently of a deliberate urban experiment." •

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My Writings on the Complete Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

(This 3-disc Blu-ray set was issued by Kino in 2018.)

O poeta do Castelo [The Poet of Castelo, 1959]

O mestre de Apipucos [The Master of Apipucos, 1959]

Couro de gato – (La peau du chat) [Cat Skin, 1960]

Garrincha, alegria do povo [Garrincha: Joy of the People, 1963]

O padre e a moça [The Priest and the Girl, 1965]

Cinema Novo [1967]

Brasília, contradições de uma cidade nova [Brasilia: Contradictions of a New City, 1968]

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