Review: DRIVE !!!!

WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW

PERFECT

Everything

Screenplay by Hossein Amini

Director:Nicholas Winding RefnActors:Ryan Gosling
Carey Mulligan
Bryan Cranston
Albert Brooks
Oscar Isaac
Ron Perlman
Christina Hendricks

ECLIPSE: Review: Seeing Eclipse through Sontag's CAMP Sensibility

Eclipse is pure unadulterated "Camp". 

Totally wonderful and hilarious. It will be around in midnight shows for years, perhaps decades, to come. Why have all the reviewers who trashed it not seen this?

The first scene is Riley in the rain getting attacked, bitten by an invisible vampire, running and then screaming in agony as he lies on the pavement in the pouring rain. Nice choreography and seductive lighting, I thought.

Then the next scene is Bella and Edward in the meadow. The grass is verdant, surrounding them, brightly colored plastic flowers all over the field, the music 1940's Hollywood for romantic, and the two pretty leads declaring love for each other. Edward saying, "Marry me, marry me," in his beautiful voice and that was when I started laughing. A beautiful piece of schlock deliberately filmed with modern teens a la retro. Wonderful! So I began giggling, never expecting this sophistication, this blatant "camp" sensibility.

From Perdue University:

Definition: Camp

Aro Plays It As Perfect Camp In New Moon

CAMP: A sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content.  As Sontag puts it, "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp; not a woman, but a 'woman.'.....Sontag also distinguishes between "pure camp," which amounts to a kitsch that takes itself so seriously that we can now see it as hilarious (in other words, the camp sensibility is on the side of the audience not the author of the work), and "Camp which knows itself to be camp" and is, therefore, already making fun of itself. (Click here for Sontag's article.)

Sontag will say that the "best" camp is unconscious camp. Camp which knows itself to be "camp" is lesser. I am convinced David Slade knew his Eclipse was "camp" and deliberately made it so, which is what brought the huge audience in for this third film of the Twilight series. 

You can definitely take your boyfriend to this one!

I entered the twilight irruption (my blog) this way. At my multi-plex I saw Remember Me,(my post) because Chris Cooper was in it. I have followed his career for decades and he has never chosen a stupid script, a stupid director, a stupid movie or character in his entire film career, so that decided me on Remember Me.  In addition I got Pierce Brosnan who's work since 007 has been surprising, excellent and subtle. What is to lose here? I thought. Remember Me is a lovely little film, not made for Oscars, awards or splash, but just a wonderful, intelligent and sensitive movie and there are not many of them around at the multi-plexes. Well, I loved it, and thought Emilie de Ravin and Rob Pattinson were  excellent. So that is how I first saw Pattinson.

Not too long after Eclipse came to my multi-plex. By then I had seen the supermarket tabloids trashing a young actress named Kristen Stewart. Week after week. I finally read one -  I didn't say buy one. So sad, I thought, to do that to a really young girl. Why?

At my multi-plex I saw quite a number of theatres having Eclipse. Ah David Slade of Hard Candy is the director. That makes it really OK as Hard Candy is superb IMHO. I decided to see it to see what all the fuss was about. I saw Rob Pattinson's name was in it and I remembered him from Remember Me. Oh, I said again to myself. And I went in waiting to be surprised. A vampire teen flick is never my choice of film. You can tell I'm snobby because I say film a lot. And I spell theater with an re like this: theatre.

The "camp" never stops. Bella, Edward and Jacob with his bare chest and six pack standing in the street, and Edward saying jealously, "Doesn't he own a shirt?" From the Hollywood reporter, "Where the first film leaned heavily on camp........." and then Hollywood Reporter goes off on a different tangent, but it's interesting. The first Twilight is definitely unconscious "camp" as Hardwicke thought of it as a romance. But then she isn't too cool. She thinks she is, tho', cause every other adjective she uses is "cool".

youtube -  Jacob and Bella Kiss

The tent scene on the mountain top in the snow with the three of them is a howl! Written this way in the book, it still resonates with the violent sex tent scene in Brokeback Mountain. Whoa! The unacknowledged homo-eroticism between Jacob and Edward (Freudian especially with Edward's jealousy) and the "I'm hotter than you," line.  By then I was hysterical with laughter and so was the rest of the late show audience. The fight scene was funny, not scary, and Bella administering to Jacob in his bedroom kept me laughing and laughing. And of course the end, back in the meadow with all the bright colorful plastic flowers. An in-movie with referents to other movies. Cool.

Carlisle's Wig -  Esme's Outfit

I didn't mention the wigs, the make-up on the vampires, the tacky costumes, the body language, the proposal, all perfect "camp".

And in precession one can see Twilight and New Moon as "camp" because they are. And I can't resist seeing Hard Candy as "camp" either. Breaking Dawn for sure is going to be.

What an uplifting, amazingly original funny film I thought as I left to go home. David Slade is really good! And then I forgot about it.  Nothing to think about there, right?

Bella's Wig

And then my Foucauldian lightbulb went on. Up next:Eclipse as a visual presentation of Foucauldian Genealogy of Sexuality. Whoa!


Twilight too. Just pure "camp"!

Review: Viewing Eclipse Through A Foucauldian Genealogy of Sexuality

Foucault and Lightbulb

Well, what my wandering mind dredged up to shimmer on the surface was Foucault's History of Sexuality, and, this is where the lightbulb went on, OMG! Eclipse is a visual genealogy of sexuality! It's all there!


An object does not exist unless and until it is observed. - William Burroughs

Since my mind was and is interfaced with Foucault, Eclipse drifted into it. The lightbulb went on. I had seen Avatar the previous January and thought of writing about it from its deep meaning on Foucault's take on Nietzsche's Inscription of the Body.

The previous nine months I had spent 24/7 reading and thinking about everything Michel Foucault had written that I had so far read. Lots of books, internet articles, interviews (hard because his French accent makes him difficult to understand in English on youtube) and nothing else, and nothing criticizing him until I felt grounded in his work. Reading him is like getting the inside of your head cleaned out with steel wool.

So I immediately went back to see it again. And again and again, until I felt I really understood it from a genealogical reading.

As Foucault has said, the method of genealogy is a tool, not a theory. Genealogy is not chronology. Genealogy is not linear, not progressive, not Hegelian, not historical. 


Genealogical "cuts" can be synchronous in time, occurring at the same moment in time, they are  "cuts" into the Dominating Discourse of history, psychology, language, economics, and the arts. A "cut" into all human behavior, knowledge and thinking and feeling, ideology and concepts.


Knowledge is not for knowing. Knowledge is made for "cutting". - Michel Foucault (The Archeology of Knowledge)

Foucault's Spiraling Powerful Prose Scouring Your Mind

Sexuality in Eclipse:


Courtly Love: Passion Love. - Cortezia - A ritual of sexuality originating in the 12th century in Western Europe, Southern France, the Languedoc region, in Eleanor of Aquitaine's court. Married and divorced from Louis VII, her court traveled to the British Isles when she married Henry II.  She took her troubadours with her. This is the romance of Edward and Bella that is based on Tristan and Iseult, true love, non- consummation, (chastity or abstinence), and unity in death.

Rape: This is James, present in Twilight, who is absent but present - in Eclipse -  through his avenging mate, Victoria.


Blood Lust: These are the newborns who fit perfectly into ancient warrior hordes who killed with lust. And raped of course as spoils of war. Caesar describes all this in his victorious campaigns if you have translated or read him. 


The newborns also are descriptive of Melanie Klein's work on orality which she divides into two stages: passive sucking orality and active, biting orality. As the infant 's teeth come in it bites the mother's breasts and blood is sometimes or often mixed with the milk. The unconscious phantasies of the infant are to devour all the goodness from the mother, leaving only a shell. Here we recognize Renesmee. Klein insists that the mother must remain with the infant after nursing, not just plunk it down to go to sleep.  It is required that the mother remain with the infant for the "period of "reparation", "restoration" so the mother can be seen as whole in spite of the oral aggressive, destructive phantasies. That feelings and phantasies are not real, and the mother is still intact. She will also go into the good and bad mother imagos.

The Stone Age infant confronts its 20th century mother. - R.D. Laing


Makes you wonder about the present and historical fascination with vampires, eh. 


Conjugal Sex: This is seen in the relationships within the Cullen family - Carlisle, Esme, Jasper, Alice, Emmett and Rosalie. Outside of  the Cullens in the parents of Bella's friends in Forks, the Quileutes, etc. Nothing much is explicit, although we are told in BD about voracious vampire sex between vampires, but we neither read nor see of any evidence of it. An example of normal, family sex from which undying passion is absent, as there is constant availability and consummation. Desire is inseparable from Lack  - in a matrix with lack. Lacan.


Homoerotic Sex: Only implied between Edward and Jacob in their triangular relationship with Bella. Discussed in Freud's case studies on male paranoia. We also see it in the Tribal relationship of the wolves. Again only implied. This cut in sexuality is unconscious in the Twilight Saga.


All of these "cuts" are synchronous in time, occurring at the same moment in time. "Cuts" are not chronological; therefore, not linear, progressive or historical. The modern temptation is to attribute levels of  consciousness to the different types of sexuality, but Foucault dispenses with the idea of consciousness and its raising. When you read him and he finishes with an idea or concept, it is time to give it up.


Eclipse is a film, and the film much more so than the book, makes the genealogy of sexuality explicit, and is a gem in elucidating "CAMP" and an aspect of post - modern theory. It is an introduction to Foucault's tool chest as he calls it.

Great "CAMP" Scene

ZIZEK: THE FILM AND THE MAN = THE DESERT OF THE REAL

Trailer from www.zeitgeistfilms.com
http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/trailer.mov

All - yes -ALL- neo-liberals, liberals, and radicals are required to know who ZIZEK is. It would help if conservative and the religious right also knew. Keanu Reeves in The Matrix knew, why don't you.?

After Baudrillard comes Zizek!

Zizek on Belief
http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/belief.mov

http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/trailer.mov

http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/belief.mov

And for other radical films instead of Hollywood:

http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/

The fact that Zizek's film premiered at 2005 Toronto Films means that Cronenberg knows very well who Zizek is.

Review: BUCK Reading Through Nietzsche and The Inscription of the Body

Here's Ebert's review which has committed the sin of entering the psychological swamp of interpretation, which misses the secret of the film and reduces it to just another warm and fuzzy documentary. Very ho hum review. If you still like a standard review try elsewhere. Google will help you.


Me, I'm in ecstasy over it. It is an enthralling film for the intelligent viewer. That means if you don't love it then you are probably stupid.

Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals traces the genealogy of torture and the Inscription of the Body, a crucial concept that Foucault ran with, but that Ayn Rand overlooked to her great loss. Cronenberg's long obsession with the body and its interfaces understands perfectly.

Reading through Nietzsche: Torture throughout history, and especially with early man, was the means to inscribe memory, to create a consciousness that can only come with a memory. Ghastly, but true.

How does one create a memory for the human animal?

How does one go about to impress anything on that partly dull, partly flighty human intelligence - that incarnation of forgetfulness - so as to make it stick? ... in fact, there is perhaps nothing more terrible in man's earliest history  than his mnemotechnics. "A thing is branded on the memory to make it stay there;  only what goes on hurting will stick" ... Whenever man has thought it necessary to create a memory for himself, his effort has been attended with torture, blood, sacrifice. ... the most repulsive mutilations, such as castration; the cruelest rituals in every religious cult (and all religions are at bottom systems of cruelty). (Nietzsche GOM 192-94)





If you have a level of unbelief here, then go ask a person about a particular tattoo they have. They will tell you when, why, how, what, who, in other words, all about it. They remember all theses things that are now Inscribed on their Memory. A voluntary and paid for acceptable torture.

Of course Nietzsche has been condemned for stating this, and ignored for his own hatred of it, while at the same time seeing its necessity for early man's consciousness to come into being. Our present hatred of this practice concerns female genital mutilation. If you bring your full understanding of Nietzsche with you when you consider this practice, you will become aware that it has nothing to do with human rights. It is a sacred practice to control the sexuality of women. (But the sexuality of the feminine will never be controlled, however they or we pretend that it is.) Middle eastern men will never give it up. It is the cornerstone of the fundamentalist Muslim adherents, much as confession is for the Catholic church.

First time director - Cindy Meehl

Back to Buck whose alcoholic father so abused him that a sports coach who forced him to take a shower saw the deep horrifying scars on his back and buttocks from being terrorized and beaten that was ongoing for years. The sports coach called the sheriff in and Buck went to a wise and wonderful foster home, that increased his understanding of what he needed in life and what horses need in life. Children and adults also. And even Buck himself, the Horse Whisperer so sensitively presented in this film, will say in it, that his horribly abusive childhood was the cornerstone of his perfect empathy with horses. And people BTW. 


"Your horse is a mirror to your soul. Sometimes you will like what you see and sometimes you won't." - Buck Brannaman





Torture and The Inscription of His Body - and always the Mind with it - created a consciousness in him, a memory that is now indelible. 


His horse training clinics for which he travels 40 weeks a year testifies to his mission in life. ($20 to watch) His clients speak about the effects changing their behavior in all other parts of their life and how they raise their children and interact with other people. This is the real beauty of his work. And we can extrapolate how certain humans were inscribed with a memory that was then communicated without the torture the first ones endured.


We need to be more mindful and appreciative of that lonely German genius Nietzsche, who has given us the rudimentary tools for this quality of understanding. We meet it again in Temple Grandin, who has designed slaughter house circular chutes that are now standard operating procedure in 50% of slaughter houses in North America. I keep wondering if the increase in autism is not an increase in a particular focussed intelligence to advance mankind. Temple Grandin does not think linearly. She thinks in discontinuous pictures like Alice Cullen. And since we are no longer in linear time.........Is this the new mind for humanity coming into being?

Robert Gordon - Deborah Butterfield
Hi Robert!

Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield has made sculptures all her artistic life on just horses, and she practices dressage with her own horses. She began with twigs and now casts. Some of Buck's clients have taken up the practice of dressage with cattle horses, saying that it is perfect for refining their skills, and they do not end up in a dead end practice for its own beauty, but apply it to their work with cattle.

Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield

Politically in this film we see people of great integrity, self-reliance, courage, intelligence, and desire for learning. We do not see people who are ever going to champion universal health care, universal government intervention in their personal lives, but not only that, they are not going to tolerate it in any form. Neo-liberals, watch out! 

I would like to say that the pictures of Buck in childhood, before his mother died, show a child with a beautiful sensitive mouth. The mouth of the man is still beautiful.

Review: Another Earth At the Moxie in Springfield MO

If you miss this you will be sorry. You may not know it until a few years have gone by, but you will know it. Trust me.
AND IT HAS BEST KISS EVER
 
Here's part of Roger Ebert's review:If she had not had too many beers. If she had been listening to a different radio station. If he had not been on the road in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fatal crash was the sum of an infinite series of "ifs," tracing back to if life had never evolved on Earth in the first place. In our lives, we surf the wave of chance.

Not as elegant as Nabokov but the same idea:

There are always at least two occasions when two persons, unwittingly, almost meet. Each time destiny seems to have prepared this meeting with the greatest care, attending first to one possibility, then another, ordering the tiniest detail and leaving nothing to chance. But each time some tiny, unattended eventuality intervenes to prevent the coming together, and the two lines diverge once again at a greater rate... But destiny is much too persistent to allow itself to be put off by a failure. It arrives at its ends, by such subtle machinations that not even a click is heard when at last the two persons are brought together. (Nabokov)(IE 81)

Read Ebert and then come back so plot is out of the way.

If you have not read Paul Auster's The Music of Chance, then read it. DeLillo dedicated Cosmopolis to Auster.

It arrived unheralded at Sundance 2011 and won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize as well as the Special Jury Prize. "Another Earth" was made on a low budget, Brit Marling and Mike Cahill wrote it, Marling acted in it, and Cahill shot and edited it himself.

Kind of like Rob Pattinson's impromptu music on youtube. Is anyone listening? Why does everything of value require slick production and reproduction? Because Walter Benjamin told us so almost 100 years ago now. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction on another of my blogs.

And Baudrillard has told us recently: If time accelerates, then go infinitely slowly. So according to Socrates, if slick CGI is required, go hand held cameras and shoe string production values.

Another Earth is visually fictionalizing Baudrillardian theory. Does this mean his theory is disappearing. We can only hope so. This is how he meant it to happen. Theory is not intended to last for hundreds of years while white suits in labs perform endless experiments trying to disprove it and only ending up confirming it. Do I need to tell you why?

The above quote describes Destiny in the near death experience of Rhoda in Another Earth.  More elaboration reading through Baudrillard on my blog on Cosmopolis.

We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example.... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Impossible Exchange 82)

 
Kenzaburo Oe in A Personal Matter  opts for a choice-centered cosmology, and puts this in the mouth of one of his characters:
Every time you stand at the crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you... 

Here is the woman known as Saw Lady who performed the sound track for Another Earth.

Natalia Paruz The Saw Lady Playing in the Subway
On the soundtrack of Another Earth.
She found me on twitter

@abbeysbooks Thank u for recommending Another Earth to @NamsoonK! (I played the saw on the soundtrack. This is me http://youtu.be/lPvTTc7jAVQ 

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