Week 7

Throughout the blog I’ve been more ‘reflective’ about the films than I have about my own process of reviewing; so whether or not I’ve been reflectively chronicling my progress as assigned, is anyone’s guess. Don’t know don’t care.


This time round, I was the most confident since starting out, having established some idea of what a review sets out to do; which is to say, I have personally defined ‘the review’ for myself, and in so doing think I could tackle any feature, no matter how foreign or lurid. Films are stories by people, and no obscure stylistic flourish can shroud a story’s relevance; so long as one has the patience to sift through the sights and sounds and find threads of the universal. As mentioned in earlier blog entries, negative reviews have repeatedly complained most fervently about ‘accessibility’. To what? Well, to these universal threads by which any story has relative significance. Is it perhaps idealistic to speculate there’s universality in every story? I don’t think so.  How else would empathy be possible, outside the theatre where the lives of others are as deserving of consideration and appreciation as our own, simply because they are.


So, as mentioned my definition of the review is almost fully formed, and it has everything to do with identifying the universality within each story. These threads may be widely accommodating, but are still subject to the specific colouring of their storyteller’s, their biases and artistic choices which occasionally problematize their accessibility. This reviewer however is humbly of the opinion that the line between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ film is intractably fuzzy; your experience of a film is mostly relative to your expectation, and your expectation relative to a nucleus of factors, including your life experiences by which identification with the offered threads is possible. If a viewer lacks experiences by which he or she would otherwise resonate with a depicted place/person/circumstance, then there’s a response scale polarized as ‘don’t know-don’t care’, or ‘don’t know-wanna know’; potentially catalytic intrigue or instant/indifferent dismissal.


This said, films like Tiny Furniture put me in the latter category; I’m unfamiliar with this world, that of snooty-privileged artisans posing as bohemian victors of struggle, and am whetted for more. As mentioned in my review, Dunham could have produced a sharper film had she stuck to satire; but in retrospect, I think more of Aura. Her concerns about her present and choking fears for her future seem less whiny as I reluctantly pass the half-way mark of my own studies. Am I doomed to a similarly lavish post-study period of rutted languor, fated to a bloody succession of neurotic sexual encounters until some distant, mythologized arrival point of ‘adjustment’?


So be it.

Week 6

I almost regret choosing to review this film. I’m a Haneke fan, but Code Unknown (one of his more enigmatic works; and that’s saying something), was horribly difficult to wade through and form a coherent opinion of. I had to unravel the films ambiguities first, find what for me was Haneke’s intent and then to that respond as best I could. But I feel I’ve benefited from the exercise, along the lines of reading something out of your usual range to forcibly increase vocabulary (if that makes sense).

Haneke has called himself cinemas last modernist, and his lurching still cam is testament to this confession, an unswerving devotion to a particular style that doesn’t pander to audiences, even gleefully alienates them; and as with the modernists, his primary concerns have been dredging hideous examples of subversion in evidence of how powerless is societal regulation to subdue humanity’s ‘mean streak’. Personally, human ‘nature’ isn’t a comfortable idea being too absolute, and I’m more akin with Locke’s concept of tabula-rasa; the idea that we’re blank-slates from birth, and though biological forces are an undeniable influence, character is for the most part shaped progressively by the decisions our circumstantial existences force us to make.  

There’s a misanthropic cynicism running through Haneke’s work which is ‘enjoyable’ as a sick joke, but is too negative to be considered serious meditation on human morality and ‘the void’. This raises interesting points about the varying reasons why a reviewer finds his or herself unable to respond positively to a film, whether they couldn’t find any agreement with the directors world view,  or were underwhelmed by an execution that failed to match even the grandest premise. Certainly, Haneke’s execution is deliberately fragmented, which contrasts with the obviousness of his aims, which are to sketch the abysmal proportions of the contemporary communication glitch.  But then this also mirrors the idea of communication breakdown, so that his super-pixellated vignettes that devolve into gibberish are a narrative device, in which non-linear storytelling is itself a thematic element.

Arguably then, Haneke’s ‘failure’ to make any memorable points concerning the sociological maelstrom he conjures, could be considered ‘the point’. That audiences may’ve been expecting Haneke’s version of a resolution was another ‘point’; when did he communicate that he’d been brainstorming solutions to the broadest communication issues, to the post-colonial wounds the film briefly touches, to the age-old enigmas of love? These expectations, so it’s smugly implied by Haneke, are the result of yet another communication breakdown. God, when will it end!?!

Week 5

I don’t like movies like Winters Bone. I like escapism, and certainly Winters Bone was enveloping enough to cast a seamless illusion; but honestly, I like escaping to richer vistas, not barren tundras of woe. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy Winters Bone. I did. I just wouldn’t watch it again, not like I religiously view some of my favourite movies, for example anything by Sofia Copolla, Tim Burton, Paul Thomas Anderson etcetera. I feel about Debra Graniks films much the same as I do about Micheal Hanekes; they have to be seen, but more as an obligation to the language of cinema. There are only so many rape scenes I can handle before I call out gimmick.

I’m beginning to think that as well as audience, I might benefit from working on concision, as careful wording will bring my word-count down and afford me room to say more, rather than labour existing points (which I’ve noticed I do a lot). For example, I wanted to talk about John Hawkes’s character Uncle Teardrop, mostly because his performance was such an unexpected departure from anything I’ve seen him in before; he was so quietly menacing, in contrast with the nice-guys he’s played (ala Me and You and Everyone We Know). Where did he learn to be so malicious? David Hopper I suspect.

Also, though independent cinema is generally lauded for its ambitiously extensive range of themes, exploring nooks and crannies of existence at which a spineless Hollywood balks, there’s less originality than you might think. In fact, there are independent ‘formulas’ as much as there are cut-out plots and characters populating the box-office crème-de-crème. This comes to mind only because Winter’s Bone, without coming across as derivative, is vaguely reminiscent of other films. The reusable thread here is beautiful/young/female protagonist combats the brutal forces in her environment and its cretin-inhabitants; another ‘little girl lost’ portrait with a white-trash slant. Again, Winter’s Bone is not mere regurgitation and has plenty to offer beyond its liberal borrowing of materials from this canon; it fails however to completely transcend the films it’s in ode to, and without the added elevation it is questionable as to whether Winter’s Bone would’ve been the same movie.

Week 4

My comparative analysis for Daydream Nation was reminiscent of The Future’s, in that there were arguments as to the films being too ‘indie’. The negative reviewers claims concerning The Future were less warranted, because unlike with Daydream Nation there wasn’t an alienating intertextuality; which is to say, The Future was just deliberately odd, whereas Daydream Nation is steeped in deliberately obscure references to other media (films, music etc). This type of intertextuality requires viewers to have a back-knowledge prior to viewing, by way of comprehensively accessing its aesthetic choices. This can elevate the experience, but it can also detract from it; if the references are to media conventionally associated with exclusive subcultures, then logically the unaffiliated won’t hold the key (so to speak) to unlocking some of the films subtler aims. Admittedly, the films bizarrely salient Sonic Youth reference seemed an arbitrary ornament to the rest of the story, lending a bit of kitsch; and beyond that, nothing much really. Not to mention the cinematic and celebrity references, some of which were obvious (Roman Polanski, Atom Egoya), and some of which were stylistic, the bleak provincial setting for instant which stank of Twin Peaks. In a good way of course; I mean, for those who’ve seen it, who doesn’t love Twin Peaks? Though my review was positive, there were times when I thought writer/director Mike Goldbach relied to heavily on kitsch homage, when he’d have been better off delaying production to swap some of his stylistic flourish for one or two more original sub-plots.

I’m a lot more confident about review writing now; this one just rolled out. I don’t know whether its coherent writing though, being as I am without immediate access to a second opinion, so audience awareness is something I should be working on; but I feel like everything I wanted to say about this film got said, which is satisfying beyond words. Also, more and more the things I notice as praiseworthy in a film are often the same as those being recognised in the reviews I pull from Rotten Tomatoes; which is affirming in that it means my eye for cinematic detail is becoming more defined the more time I spend debating film pros/cons.

I don’t know if I’m being ‘reflective’ enough in these blog entries. They’re meant to be a reflective chronicle of our progress aren’t they, and I’ve thus far used them as a psychic dumping ground for all my thoughts and feelings regarding the films I’ve reviewed. I’ll continue as so until instructed otherwise.

One thing that’s really starting to bug me about the review-language, is that it’s nauseatingly high-brow. I feel I have to match their tone if my work is to be taken at all seriously. But if my review is anything close to an emotional response, then the ‘knowledge apriori’ speak of reviewing hampers that. I need to find some way of making reviewing more expressive, making it personal, and yet still relevant to the high-brow circles. Difficult.

Week 3

Sleeping Beauty’s cryptic themes deserve an especial deciphering.

The film itself, as mentioned by reviewer-in-the-positive Andrew O’Hehir, seems more concerned with the relationships between its vixens-for-hire than it is with generic heterosex-ploitation. To labour the point, Clara’s strictly no-penetration policy for clients, no matter how bloated their cheque-book, is clear evidence of more brewing beneath the films surface than fetishist indulgences. Yet somehow Leigh manages to imbue this eroticized Lynchian world with compensatory menace, even without a ‘brutal’ sex scene (which these types of films conventionally have in abundance).  This is done through severe cinematography and a reticent style (lauded as ‘opaque’) that serves to speak uncomfortable volumes about the incentives of the women selling themselves, dispelling cinematic myths about the archetypal Whore and removing Her kitschy glamour. Leigh wants such exaggerated depictions of women’s sexuality replaced with more realistic considerations.

It’s very much a purgative of Hollywood assumptions and repressions.

The fact that Campion has come to embody the contemporary ‘female vision’ in film, reveals subaqueous discussion points close to Sleeping Beauty’s languidly beating heart, seeing as Ms. Campion gave the film a very public stamp of approval.  This viewer speculates Sleeping Beauty is not merely a post-post-feminist argument against the abuses of distorted on-screen representation, but also a lament of women’s cloistering roles generally, not the least of which results in a stifling of Her cinematic voice. A general industry denial of the female vision.

Wasn’t  Kathryn Bigelow the first women in academy history to take Best Director? (for war epic The Hurt Locker). And that was only last year. The most female directors have done previous to this is garner a Best Original Screenplay, Sofia Copolla for example in 2003 with Lost in Translation (which had enough buzz for Best Picture and Director, but inexplicably lost out that year to Lord of the Rings). This isn’t because the few female directors who’ve been eligible don’t meet standards; this is because of misogynist anachronisms lingering in the conduct of countless mainstream institutions which it would be a ludicrous venture to list. In our 'liberal' society gender inequality is a familiar presence, despite an unjustified advocacy of a seamlessly just, equitable and utterly fictitious present.

We are not living in a post-feminist society.

If an existing idea is being marginalized it is because the reigning ideologies don't see it as profitable; which is to say, capitalism doesn’t have a use for feminism right now. But what to do with its lingering supporters? Discredit them of course, by saying their aims have been well-met, by giving feminism a fictional closure and making effective dissemination for the active naysayers virtually impossible.

Anyway, it’s surprising to find such dated prejudice alive and well in the arts; but then I guess that’s a liberal conceit, the assumption that liberal and equitable are synonymous.

More and more I’m convinced of cinemas power, and am in something like awe at the as yet unexplored possibilities of the medium; which in turn means I despair at the expensive, otherwise empty-calorie fare of films like The Smurfs, or any one of the current tween franchises.

Me, a Snob? You could say that.

Week 2

How surprising! So far I’ve hosted Melancholia and The Future under my fledgling reviewer's finesse, because they were standouts from my festival outing this year. I’d been under the impression that a closer ‘critical’ inspection would sour my initial admiration by making their flaws apparent, not to mention the over-kill factor of the critical-revelry. Oh contraire! These excursions have only brought me closer to these two films, to the result of increased affection for them and their directors. Amidst all this, the questionable role of the critic has arisen as an odd and only vaguely relevant transistor in the ongoing language of film.  

The Future had my ‘like’, but before exploring the varied breadth of its critical reception it didn’t have my love. The negativity with which it was met, as my mahara hosted run-down on this film explains, was almost singly in response to stylistic maneuvers. They were complaints that July was too twee in delivery, that she alienated uninitiated viewers by identifying too closely with twee-subcultures.  Firstly, the line between twee and magical realism is much too blurry to credibly ground any claim that July actively alienates the non-twee from enjoying her film. What a notion!. Secondly, though the film universe has its own warped logic, this is easily decipherable, thus making the style a vital component of July’s idiosyncratic storytelling (albeit a delayed gratification). Imposing fluidity on consensus reality (transcending parameters of normalcy in the artists proposed suspension of the Real),  is a veritable absolute of the creative process as a whole. The creative process is about assuming or advocating fluidity to escape absolutes. Subverting the given is quintessentially ‘creative’.  

TWEE

Well, here goes; my pet-research into ‘TWEE’, in explanation of Roger Moore’s complaint against ‘The Future’.

For those of my age bracket twee should already stand as a generic nucleus of recognisable elements manifest in film, fashion and music (by the osmosis of media-saturation, which tends to be more and more age-specific). I thought I’d have difficulty finding academic articles relating to the topic, that the most I’d find would be sardonic articles crucifying those whose identification with twee and similar sub-cultural phenomena are laughably transparent. However, semi-concerned articles emerged after a thorough googling, most of these chronicling the life and death (apparently) of twee, indie and hipster, the latter being inevitably related as the reigning sub-cultural identities of recent teen and tween generations. In fact, twee and indie are brethren under the umbrella of contemporary hipster, of which they are both off-shoots.

Firstly, there is indie; Jude Rogers of ‘The Observer’ and Mark Grief of ‘New York’ (2007, 2010) both agree that indie began in the mid to late eighties and carried on into the nineties as a collection of independently funded bands, making music external to the necessarily  restricting standards of mass media. The most popular forms of first-wave indie were acoustic, genres like garage-rock and the legendary bloom of nineties grunge, preceding contemporary indie sub-categories of sunny-folk which, when screened through indie, is in essence twee.

There was initially no singular encapsulating aesthetic or definition of indie, so diverse was indie’s first wave, unified only retroactively on the grounds of their purposive anti-commercial marginality. It was these anti-commercial notions which the music channelled that virally leavened ‘indie’ into a full-blown sub-culture, capturing a common leftist ache. In fact Grief (2010) cites the varying shades of hipster, the contemporary manifestation of the indie (between which there is a colourful history of shifting influences and micro-ideologies), as conglomerate hybrids of the Lefts most popular, and now empty signifiers (like feminism, black civil rights, the gay and lesbian community etc).

He furthermore states that contemporary indies/hipsters have exchanged the revolutionary core of these counter-cultures for their veneers in a will to social dominance.  Thus in arbitrarily deriving its form from a loose history of counter-cultures, Grief concludes hipsterdom’s aims are to undermine an imagined majority or Other (the Other of social realities which participants do not themselves inhabit), and also that hipsterdom does this by assuming knowledge ‘a priori’ over the majority.

To explain, the ideological positioning of real minority groups actively combating the Other necessitates a reflexive presumption of superiority, that the isolation of the minority world-view from the wider cultural script is a detriment to the mainstream; or more simply, the minority knows something the majority doesn’t (hipster esotericism!). This then, is why within hipster circles fore-knowledge of new-bands and the increasing obscurity of these bands, is crucial to maintaining the hipster image.

 It is not difficult to imagine just how indie and twee matured into hipsterdom, both having constructed an evil commercial Other against which to do battle and rabble-rouse.

But back to twee. Next to the evolution of the hipster twee seems to pale in significance. However, Greif also paints a picture of the ‘green indie’, a more peace-loving nature- oriented indie (modern hippy?) that in so closely resembling the twee aesthetic, we can safely assume is synonymous. Characteristics of the twee then include a predilection for folk music, and canvas apparel screen-printed with trees and furry critters, as well as tribal-wears such as feathered Native American Indian headpieces, coinciding with the hipster's facile appropriation of Leftist iconography (Grief, 2010). It is a valuation of the ‘child-like’, a preference for whimsy. It has also been described as ‘precious’. Returning to Grief (2010), exemplars of precious-indie and therefore twee film-making include nearly all the films of Wes Anderson, each oozing twee-quirk in its own right. These are The Royal Tenenbaums (a veritable ark of style-sense for twee-indies), The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox (‘twee’, and then some), and lesser known debuts Bottle Rocket and Rushmore.  

All considered, if Moore finds July’s twee aesthetic unpalatable, it could be stated his reason for which is a sense of alienation, an exclusivity of her style as accessible only to twee initiates. 


He’s obviously not indie. 


References

Mark, G. (2010). What was the hipster? Retrieved September 19, 2011 from

http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/gtx/retrieve.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale%28en%2CUS%2C%29%3AFQE%3D%28ti%2CNone%2C21%29What+Was+the+Hipster+%3AAnd%3AFQE%3D%28da%2CNone%2C4%292010%3AAnd%3AFQE%3D%28pu%2CNone%2C8%29New+York%24&sgHitCountType=None&inPS=true&sort=DateDescend&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&tabID=T003&prodId=EAIM&searchId=R1&currentPosition=1&userGroupName=aut&docId=A240392342&docType=IAC

Rogers, J. (2007, July 8). Smells like indie spirit. The Observer, n/a,  10-11. Retrieved from

http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/docview/250317108

Week 1

!!!ALERT; DISCLAIMER!!!
After Brief 1's abysmal feedback, I've thus far acquired a new 'skill', which all the literature gathered (by way of defining reflective practice) ranted somewhat repetitiously is its purpose; and that skill is . . . never assume you know what you are doing, or assume you can 'wing' an assigned task with the fuzziest comprehension of what is required, and even if you are relatively certain of what is required there is no loss of dignity in double checking with a lecturer, willingly at our disposal.

Anyway . . .

This is fun. I’ve so far enjoyed ripping my two exemplar reviews (of Melancholia), the positive and negative, to composite pieces to then reassemble (without perfectly emulating either) as my own ‘middling’ review. That’s middling as in neither too positive or negative (I'm too much of a narcissist to question my own ability). However, I think I might be disadvantaged in having restricted myself to the ‘middling’ stance, between the expository stances of my exemplars. The idea was that my comparative analysis of each would give me enough proximal familiarity with the stronger stances, and then my ‘middling’ one would be a reflective exploration of both. But how can I give myself the range of a versatile critic when my writing is all in one gear (so to speak)? At some future-point in this project, I might have to go back on my own specifications for the review and assume a strong yay or nay, or suffer the spineless stylistic rut of the middle-path indefinitely.

I think that reviewing a film as divisive and as steeped in external controversy as Melancholia, is what has brought this proposal flaw to my attention. Thanks Lars!

               Kirsten Dunst gives Trier the stink eye as he 'gaffes' like a Nazi at Cannes

Interesting to note; the negative review was considerably longer than the positive. It was not that the negative was any more or less singular in its argument, only that the negative reviewer more rigorously justified his stance by citing actual craft flaws, whereas the positive reviewer’s primary reference was the films emotional accessibility and his/her own emotional responses; how it made him or her feel. I considered this generally revealing of cinemas function on an individual level; that we go see a film with the expectation of an immersive engagement that will diminish the gap whereby one can be objective, taking away the consummate effect which, if successful, leaves us blissfully unaware of 'flaws'. The particularly acerbic tone of some negative reviewing perhaps comes from the betrayal of that expectation, more searing than prosaic disappointment with that not-so-special effect or that lacklustre performance, etcetera.

Digital Assets/LO's?

Polsani (2003) waxes lyrical about LO’s or Learning Objects, which for the moment have more conceptual clarity than digital assets by way of their educative objective being stated, whereas the ends to which an asset have made it valuable  are not semantically salient in ‘asset’. It is maddeningly neutral. This user brings up Learning Objects only because he has the vaguest suspicion LO’s are, or in the right context can be, digital assets, and that in Polsanis description of LO’s he unwittingly sketches the basics of an asset at his most general, somewhere in the thick of his technical particularizing of LO’s and their higher learning function.   So basically, Learning Object, and thus Digital Asset, is an umbrella term for any digital content which is of relative value (which with LO’s is learning); however Polsani’s LO specifics are minimally applicable to the Asset. Accessibility and Reusability seem to be, if not requisites, then conducive features to an asset’s credibility, concordant value and ultimate longevity as an asset; they are also basic meta-structural requisites of a digital object, the walls of the container even before it has content. They give it form on the web. 

This is pretty esoteric stuff; an example might be in order. Pending. 

Polsani, P. R. (2003). Use and abuse of reusable learning objects. Journal of Digital Information. 4, 1-7. Retrieved from http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/89/88

Digital Assets?

This reluctant user is having difficulty with defining and subsequently locating a ‘digital asset’, and needless to say am at a cul de sac as far as my required ‘proposal’ for the amorphous asset is concerned. This user is however aware of ‘artefacts’, being merely digital texts (video image or other) embedded in my Mahara views, or anywhere else for that matter; and on quizzing Frank there was mention of a hierarchy. Does this mean these artefacts are potential assets depending on shifting scales of value relative to whatever ends the ‘asset’, such as an e-portfolio, is facilitating? Arg.