The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010)

10/10
6:00pm-11:00pm
I have been chomping at the bit to see Christian Marclay's The Clock since I first read about it after it won the Silver Lion at Vienna way back in 2011. It finally made its way to Montreal's Musee d'Arts Contemporain for a couple of months and I caught 5 hours of it last night.
If you haven't heard about it, The Clock is a 24-hour long video compilation culled from clips referencing time from thousands of movies, and playing out in real time. So, for example, when it's 7:23pm in real life, The Clock is showing a clip from a movie when it's 7:23pm (or thereabouts). But it's much more than just a collection of clips of clocks smashed together. The clips are edited together in incredibly cleverly ways, often including overlapping or mixed sound, that makes the whole thing feel like a giant, neverending film experience taking placeover the course of a day. Marclay also manipulates the scenes in clever ways - a character in a French movie from the 50's picks a phone and dials a number at 8:11pm, and the call is answered by Fox Mulder at 8:11pm in the 2000's, and so on.
And the longer you watch it, the more references you catch. For example, at 6:30pm, a character might make reference to having to eat dinner in a half hour. At 7:00pm, if you pay attention, you'll likely see a clip from that same movie of the character doing just that. It's this kind of hunting (as well as the fun in recognizing clips and figuring out what movie they're from) that makes it so easy to keep watching. Despite being constantly aware of the passing time, the 5 hours I spent genuinely blew by, until the last half hour when my stomach kept reminding me I hadn't had dinner yet.
Another fascinating thing is to see what common actions happen at a given time across a multitude of movies. When I came in at 6pm, there were a lot of scenes with people coming home from work, or commuting, or sitting down to dinner. At 7-8pm, a lot of scenes of people getting ready to go out or children being put to bed. At 8pm there were a surprising amount of scenes at the theatre. From 9-11pm, lots of stuff taking place in bed (rarely sexual, however), lots of plots being hatched behind closed doors under cover of night. The shift in tone, from the lightness of the evening to the darker themes that permeate the film events that occur at night, is also very noticeable. Another thing The Clock maybe points out unintentionally is just how many plot points in movies revolve around characters being late for something.
I'm planning to head back to The Clock next Saturday to catch it during the day. I would really like to see what clips Marclay came up with for the obscure 2am-5am times, and even though the museum does give it a few full 24-hour showings, I doubt I'll be able to make it to those. Hopefully one day we'll be able to access it on the internet at our leisure, kind of like the 24-hour music video for Pharrell Williams' "Happy".
All that to say, if you have a chance to see The Clock somewhere near you, don't miss the opportunity. It is a completely unique, fascinating and overwhelming experience. Here is a bootleg clip someone made from 10:15pm to 10:35pm if you're interested in a sampling.

10:00am-4:00pm
I went back on Saturday and watched from 10:00am to 4:00pm and enjoyed myself again immensely. The major difference is the wide variety of things that take place during the day, I found it considerably more wide open than the earlier night scenes that I had seen. Lots more outdoors stuff, obviously. And a surprising (but I guess it shouldn't be) amount of train scenes. As expected, lots of classroom and office scenes too.
One thing I enjoyed watching was the progression of characters waking up. Unfortunately I didn't get to see the brunt of them, which I imagine take place between 6am and 8am, but it was still fun to see. Almost everybody waking up after 10am in a movie is either lazy or late (like real life, more or less). Marlon Brando had a good one at 11:30am from a film I didn't recognize where, upon being handed the newspaper, remarks with some bemusement that other people must be awake as well. The latest I remember before I left was Jeff Daniels at 3:30pm.
I'm more curious than ever about the 1am - 5am ish timeslots, so I really hope this gets streamed over the internet or something one day. Or that it comes through Montreal again and I can commit to staying overnight to watch it.

The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010)

6/10
Been wanting to see this one for a while. Hollywood goes Slow? I'm in. Well, director Anton Corbijn has a good eye for visuals, impressively filming beautiful landscapes in Sweden and Italy, but as a director, his style seems lacking. Witness Nicolas Winding Refn doing a similar thing much better a few years later with Drive. Heck, even Jim Jarmusch did it better a year earlier with The Limits of Control. Also, both those movies had fantastic soundtracks, something which I thought really let down The American (strange, given Corbijn's history as a music video director and his previous feature on Joy Division).
Finally, I just didn't buy George Clooney in the role of a cold-blooded killer, no matter how hard he set his jaw. With his cocktail party looks and dark brown sweaters, it was a poor fit from day one, though I can see why he would want to try the role.
So it didn't really come together for me, but I can see what Corbijn was aiming for. I think it was an interesting effort if not a success.

Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010)

4/10
This had "looks stupid but actually is pretty funny" hype so we watched it...yeah it was only stupid. In fairness, I already disliked half the main ensemble (Rob Corddry has been shrill and obnoxious in everything I've seen him overact in and John Cusack has the charisma of a baked potato) so the movie didn't have much of a chance with me. I do like Craig Robinson and Clark Duke was okay but I thought his role had a lot more potential. There were a few good jokes and a lot of throwaways, but the actual plotlines were pretty boring in themselves, so it was lose-lose in that regard. Just wasn't for me.

We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau, 2010)

7/10
The enthusastic line from a review used to push We Are What We Are is "does for cannibals what Let the Right One In did for vampires!". It's not hard to imagine that's what the filmmakers were going for, but I don't think it's quite true. Indeed, they've taken a subgenre that typically belongs to a schlocky horror genre and turned it into a more dramatic and emotionally weighty film (while still retaining some blood and gore, as LTROI did), but I don't think it succeeds as well. It's got a good story - when their father and provider dies, a mother and her three temperamental kids have to find a way to provide for themselves, which of course consists of finding human victims - and it's very well directed. There's a symphonic score that constantly threatens to be too much, but I liked it. It touches on a lot of themes (fatherless families, domineering mothers, family ties on the whole, homosexuality, poverty), many of which are probably representative of pertinent themes in Mexico that would require a better knowledge of the region to fully appreciate. I felt there were a lot of solid elements in place but the result only came off as "okay", and I probably would have liked it less if I didn't have such a prediliction for horror movies that at least try to be something more.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, 2010)

9/10
2010's Senna was a much-lauded documentary assembled entirely from archival footage to form a complete portrait of one man. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu uses the same means to accomplish a different end. The film opens on Ceausescu's last day, white-haired and disheveled, being interrogated in a dingy court room like a common criminal for his crimes against humanity. The film then goes back, taking us through Ceausescu's ascension to power and his communist dictatorship that lasted from 1965 to 1989. Rather than using a typical "how did we get here" narrative, the movie is assembled from Romanian propagandist films - so for 3 hours we're inundated with footage of Ceausescu at parades, touring building sites and bakeries, entertaining political figures from Nixon to Gorbachev, giving intense speeches vowing to stamp out capitalism...this is Ceausescu's Romania as Ceausescu would have it, hence the "auto"biography of the title. In the end, the movie almost seems like Ceaucescu's defense to the questions barked at him in the court room in those opening 2 minutes, hideously skewed and self-righteous to the end.
I'm no political fanatic but I found the film massively engrossing, and director Andrei Ujica's approach extremely novel. With both this and Senna coming out in the same year, I hope this means a revival of films assembled entirely from archival footage, because both of these had an enormous impact on me.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

7.5/10
The central conceit of Abbas Kiarostami's latest film is a clever one - a man and a woman meet for the first time, go strolling around Italy for the day, and are mistaken for a married couple. Slowly they begin to act like one, with such conviction that it prompts a lot of interesting questions - are the two using their newfound 'roles' to exorcise demons of past relationships? Or to say what they could never say to their current partners, if they exist? Or is this simply Kiarostami putting a budding relationship in a compressor - sort of a pessimistic Before Sunrise, crushing 20 years of togetherness into one afternoon? It's impossible to say. The script is endlessly intriguing but as a film, it's not a rousing success, which is down to the two leads. Juliette Binoche is a fantastic actress while William Shimell is a first-timer and at times it shows, rather painfully. I have no idea why Kiarostami chose to put such wildly disparate performers opposite each other. Also, their characters are not particularly empathetic - Binoche's is endearing, but borders on nutty at times. This is amplified by Shimell's character - he never fully commits to their 'pretend' marriage, wearing a perpetual look of bemusement that subtlely implies that he too, at the end of it all, might just think this woman is crazy. The movie basically makes you spend a day with two characters you don't particularly enjoy spending a day with. Frustrating because it could have been a really great movie, were it not for these missteps.

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

8/10
An exceptionally slow-moving anti-Western in the truest sense of the word (women and Native Americans winning out over the white man?), there isn't a whole lot to the movie but it very quietly spins an interesting yarn concerning questions of trust, faith, feminism and humanity. Just don't go in expecting a whole lot of action.

Vinyl: Tales from the Vienna Underground (Andrew Standen-Raz, 2010)

4/10
Maybe I was disappointed with what this wasn't rather than what it was. There's some stuff in the Viennese arts that interests me from Hermann Nitsch up through Christian Fennesz, but almost none of it was touched on in this documentary, which instead focused on the current Viennese techno "movement", if it can be called such. Unfortunately the movie has a tremendously narrow scope - no attempt is given to explain why this movement is more important than any similar scenes around the world, where it came from, and what it means. A disappointing amount of face time has been given to musicians who can only spew out horrific clichés like "vinyl is like opening a book, CDs are cold and plastic" and "the question all artists have to ask themselves is what's more important - making money or having your music heard". Clichés that, in any event, aren't even Viennese-centric, so who cares? Probably a documentary worth watching on Youtube if you're already a fan of the artists; definitely not one for an outsider to see in a theatre.

White, White World (Oleg Novkovic, 2010)

7/10
Serbia's pretty crazy it seems, or at least bleak as hell, judging from this movie (and the memory of A Serbian Film in the periphery). This is a drama centering around a group of people who are related in some way (friends, lovers and family but also pimps, whores, murderers, addicts and dealers, etc). It's hard for the viewer to find a foothold when every character is brutal and unsympathetic, but the story is interesting and well-told (although it requires some suspension of disbelief for its central twist) and it plays out like a Greek tragedy. Of note is that it's also a musical, with characters spontaneously breaking into song throughout. If it sounds cheesy, it really isn't, but I'm not sure it works or adds anything either. I would have felt the same way about the movie without em, so there you have it.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)

8.5/10
There is a certain point in Exit Through the Gift Shop (though it happens sublimely so it's likely a different point of the film for every viewer) where you figure out what's going on...and then, maybe a little bit later, the full-scale realization of what's going on hits you like a ton of bricks. For me the first came when I was watching Mister Brainwash's gallery opening and it was dawning on me just how awful, derivative, and puerile his art was. So, okay, it's intentionally bad art as social commentary. Fine. Then the second realization comes when you start to think that all these people really did show up at the gallery, bought his art, got his name in the papers, and the ultimate capper, that he's designing album art for a Madonna greatest hits collection...and the magnitude of the everything hits you like a ton of bricks.
This is a movie that goes way, way beyond words like "hoax", "mockumentary"...in fact, without exaggeration, I think it redefines the very word "hoax". It reminds me of the last lines of Pink Floyd's "Jugband Blues" - what exactly is a dream, and what exactly is a joke? Not the kind of movie that you'd want to watch over and and over again, but still one that will keep you up nights turning it over in your mind.

Senna (Asif Kapadia, 2010)

9/10
It's hard to believe, given Ayrton Senna's lifestory, that no one tried to turn this into a feature film before (instead of a documentary). It's hard to imagine any format besting what Asif Kapadia has done here though. The decision to combine voice-overs with entirely stock/archive footage is both risky and brilliant. The lo-fi fuzzy quality of some of the race footage is in stark contrast to the ultra HD/3D gloss that is so common at the theatres, and I think it does a wonderful job conjuring up some sort of nostalgic feeling in the viewer, even if you'd never heard of Senna outside this film. It was certainly the case for me. Instead of beating you over the head with testimonials to Senna's greatness, Kapadia makes you feel like he was an old friend of yours, and that nobody needed to tell you why he was so good. This nostalgic factor also makes you feel like his triumphs and failures are yours as well. It's an incredible trick and I don't know if I'll find myself feeling quite as much an affinity to a protagonist in another film this year as I did with Senna. Great story and an even better documentary.

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)

7/10
After reading multiple glowing write-ups I wanted to like this more than I did. You know that feeling when you're watching a movie and you can acknowledge it does everything right but just can't find a way to get into it? That's what I felt. The story is about an elderly woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's joining a poetry class while faced with the dilemma of covering up her grandson and his friends' repeated **** of a 16 year old girl, driving her (the girl) to suicide. The story has plenty to interest and the material is approached in a very restrained, non-sensational manner. The direction and cinematography is beautiful (not a stretch to call it poetic, really) and Jeong-hie Yun (retired for decades, if I'm not mistaken) is tremendous in the role of the grandmother. The film is very nuanced, posing lots of questions and refusing to give easy answers. While I did enjoy it, I just couldn't let myself be as taken with it as I would have liked.
Superficially there are a lot of parallels between Poetry and Mother, both Korean movies about an elderly woman forced into impossible circumstances by the crime of a teenage (grand)son. Where Mother relies more on genre conventions and a bit more "flash", Poetry may be the more technically accomplished film. I still preferred Mother though.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)

8/10
It was pretty much exactly what I thought a Werner Herzog-directed-and-narrated 3D documentary about 32,000 year old cave paintings would be like. I guess the only surprising thing was how straightforward it was (Herzog "documentaries" often contain outright lies and made-up situations) but when you're being backed by History Television, or whatever it was, I guess you have to play on the right side of the line.
I was a little surprised at how immersed and interested I was in the paintings. You'd think in a 90 minute movie about some old drawings you'd get bored after a while, but I really didn't. Herzog doesn't pose any revelatory questions on the surface but I think the film does a good job of subtly nudging the viewer to ask them of him/herself (about the only unsubtle thing is the score, which is nice, but clearly had the "wondrous and mystical" knob turned to 11). Anyone expecting cold, hard facts might be a bit disappointed as the documentary is definitely Herzogian in nature ("what kind of dreams did these cave-dwellers have?" is given precedence over "what substance did they use to paint them?", for example) but as an avowed fan, I took it all in stride.

Cold Fish (Sion Sono, 2010)

8/10
Further proof (as if Love Exposure didn't confirm it) that Sion Sono is fucking insane, and surely one of the most original directors working today. The ending is just staggering, and something very few filmmakers would have the balls to follow through with in such an unflinching fashion. The acting especially was great; my only real complaint is that I don't think the movie needed to be almost 2.5 hours long...about 20-30 minutes could have been chopped off and made for a much tighter pace.

Kidnapped (Miguel Angel Vivas, 2010)

8.5/10
I haven't caught much of the recent wave of home invasion horrors (The Strangers, Them (Ils), etc) so I'm not sure how this one stacks up against those, but I thought it was pretty great. The story isn't very original (it's almost too reminiscent of Funny Games and Panic Room) but it's directed with a lot of flair, particularly in a couple of split-screen shots that left me breathless, and the acting is tremendous. The movie is shot almost "verité" style with lots of unbroken takes and it works really well, everything comes across as distrurbingly real - helped along by some absolutely brutal violence, comparable to A Serbian Film or Funny Games in its unflinching realism. Definitely not one for weak stomachs...or for those hoping to have their faith renewed in humanity.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2010)

8/10
This is a hell of a thing to try to make sense of, from all angles - in terms of what comes up on the screen and how it even got made in the first place. I didn't investigate too much but writer/director Panos Cosmatos seems to have no prior film credits aside from being a second unit video assist operator on 1993's Tombstone (?!) yet somehow scraped together the funding to put together one of the craziest, most ridiculous sci-fi mindtrips I've ever seen. Unabashedly influenced by 2001: ASO, THX 1138, Solaris, etc, it tells the very loose story of a young woman being held captive by a strange doctor in a bizarre laboratory in the 80's. The brunt of the filmmaking process was heavily weighted in favor of costumes, set design, special effects and a great soundtrack, and the story suffers dramatically - not that Cosmatos seems to care. The plot is mostly incoherent and the ending is so laughably silly I can't help but feel it was ironic or tongue-in-cheek - in complete contrast to the rest of the movie's stone-faced seriousness. I'd compare it to a really well-made music video - a lot of fun to look at, but completely devoid of depth. If you're willing to overlook that and take it as some kind of arthouse equivalent to a popcorn movie, there's a lot to hold one's interest. Didn't stop a good number of people in my theatre from walking out, but hey. It was still quite an experience.

13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2010)

8/10
The best Takashi Miike movie I've seen in ages is also his most mature, although not without callbacks to trademarks from his canon (gross-out comedy, body horror, slapstick and of course, gore). I'm no pro of the genre but 13 Assassins plays pretty much like a straightforward "jidaigeki" (it's a remake of an earlier film), wherein a group of disparate samurai must come together against impossible odds to vanquish some great evil, in this case the demonic Lord Naritsugu. For the first half of the film I almost felt like things were being played too straight, and was getting a little restless, but the gigantic (hour-long?!) action/siege scene makes it well worth the wait. Even if you're not a fan of action and bloodshed, it's almost impossible not to feel your pulse race during the battle, which is incredibly well filmed. Definitely a movie to see, if possible, in a crowded theatre, or at least with a group of friends. Overall a lot of fun.

Lady Blue Shanghai (David Lynch, 2010)

6.5/10
Another freebie MUBI turned me on to (via Youtube in two parts, part one is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmisZlnyRM), David Lynch's 16-minute Dior-commissioned piece Lady Blue Shanghai. There isn't really much to it, and it's clearly more a piece of advertising than anything else (though clearly advertising done by Lynch and no one else), it has simple themes that might be a little hacky if they weren't such an identifiable part of Lynch's aesthetic. Not a revelation but a nice enough distraction, and the music is the highlight.

Finisterrae (Sergio Caballero, 2010)

8/10
Very surreal, slow, and strangely funny "road movie" from Spain, the debut feature from SONAR festival director Sergio Caballero. Two ghosts (literally two people in big white sheets with black holes for eyes) and one horse have to undertake a journey to Finisterre, literally the end of the world. They are led by the "Oracle de Garrel", a completely unsubtle refernce to Philippe Garrel and his movie The Inner Scar, by which this is heavily influenced. It reminded me a lot of Albert Serra's Honor de Cavalleria and Birdsong (no surprise it shares the same cameraman as Honor) - Catalan dialect, sparse dialogue, long takes, outdoor landscapes, and a very subtle sense of humor. Weird and unrepentingly pretentious, but worth a watch. It's available for free right now on MUBI - http://mubi.com/films/finisterrae

El Sanatorio (Miguel Alejandro Gomez, 2010)

8/10
Apparently Costa Rica's first ever horror movie. Presented by the director himself, who looked to be no more than 16 years old (he's actually 28), a very likeable and earnest young man. El Sanatorio is another entry in the growing "handheld horror" genre a la BWP, Paranormal Activity, The Last Exorcism, [REC], et al. The story is a classic horror trope - a group of people make a documentary about an abandoned sanatorium that's said to be haunted, and wind up with more than they bargained for. The movie, despite the wonky subtitles, is actually laugh-out-loud funny, and does a good job creating believable characters. It takes a while for the spooky stuff to go down, and it hits like an avalanche when it finally does, to the point that I was left wanting more (the movie clocks in under 80 minutes and feels like 60). The scares are good, if too few, and do seem to be heavily indebted to Paranormal Activity, but there are nice moments all around. Everything is done competently and credibly, and I enjoyed myself.