jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Forty earth years have passed since the Star Child first floated into view at the mind blowing climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and to celebrate the anniversary of a movie full of birthdays, birth metaphors, and planet-sized foetuses, the Tribeca Film Festival put on a special screening followed by an extraordinary panel consisting of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, screenwriter Ann Druyan, artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky, and actor Matthew Modine. Continue reading on About.com….

I managed to film the first 20 minutes of the panel:

2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick, 1968. *****

New on idrinkyourmilkshake.com:

• Who else could have played Daniel Plainview? Kinski?
• H.W.? H.M. Tilford? J. J. Carter? Where do all those initals come from?
• Graphological analysis of Daniel Plainview’s handwriting
• What’s with the hammers during the blowout?
• How evil is Plainview? Did you see his tear?

One afternoon last week, I found myself explaining the benefits of transcendental meditation — and its much cheaper, guru-free alternative Natural Stress Relief — to a junkie at an East Village pizza joint. (He asked.) You see, I was predisposed to love The Dhamma Brothers, a documentary about inmates of an Alabama high security prison who take up Vipassana meditation. Despite its fascinating subject, the film turned out to be a disappointment. Read my review on About.com to find out why.

I also saw Redbelt, David Mamet’s latest. It’s an entirely enjoyable fight movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as noble jiu-jitsu teacher that’s perched somewhat uncomfortably between Mamet’s usual snappiness and a few very tired genre conventions. In typical Mamet style, Redbelt is thick with cons, counter-cons, and strange coincidences, but this time, it’s nearly impossible to tell which is which. Opens on May 9.

Tonight, I’m excited to see Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, and on TV, we’re enjoying the continuing adventures of Liz Lemon and Kara Thrace. In the mobile department, Peeping Tom and Paths of Glory have proven themselves eminently watchable on a packed subway — just don’t tell Messrs. Powell and Kubrick.

The Dhamma Brothers. Andrew Kukura, Jenny Phillips, Anne Marie Stein, 2007. **
Redbelt. David Mamet, 2008. ***
Peeping Tom. Michael Powell, 1960. ***
Paths of Glory. Stanley Kubrick, 1957. ****

The Redbelt trailer:

If you drive a couple of blocks down Konrad-Adenauer-Ring from where I was born, you come to what used to be the biggest American military hospital in Europe. It was here that in 1981, the diplomats that had been held hostage in Teheran made their first stop after they were released. Jimmy Carter, the first U.S. President I was ever aware of, came to Wiesbaden to meet them. My parents went down to witness the excitement and later reported that they had, in fact, seen the back of Jimmy Carter’s head.

It ain’t much, but it’s the best Jimmy Carter story I’ve got. Jonathan Demme’s documentary Man from Plains only mentions the Iranian hostage crisis in passing as we follow Carter on a 2006 tour promoting his controversial book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. More snapshot than full-blown portrait, the film is as much about the elder statesman’s ongoing struggle to bring peace to the Middle East as it is about the ways in which the American media deflects complex and controversial issues. For more, check David Hudson’s roundup of reviews.

Jimmy Carter Man from Plains. Jonathan Demme, 2007. ***

I’m running a little contest over on idrinkyourmilkshake.com: for a chance to win one of five There Will Be Blood DVDs, grab your camera phone or webcam and upload a video of yourself saying the line that gave the site its name. The video above is the entry by IDYM regular EatHimByHisOwnLight. As a matter of fact, EatHimByHisOwnLight is the only person who has entered the contest so far, so the field is still wide open — even though he did set the bar pretty high.

My review copy of the Blood DVD arrived today, and I probably don’t have to tell you that I’ve been spending the better part of my day with it. Head on over to idym.com for details on the contest — after all, who doesn’t need more outtakes of the napkin scene in their life?

None of the movies I saw this week thrilled as much as the conclusion to the first part of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. After 200 pages of young Wart’s education, we finally get to the part about the sword in the stone. It’s Merlyn’s final lesson, presented in a hallucinatory passage that feels as if Walt Disney adapted Revelations and laced it with zen wisdom:

“Oh, Merlyn,” cried the Wart, “help me to get this weapon.”

There was a a kind of rushing noise, and a long chord played along with it. All round the churchyard there were hundreds of old friends. They rose over the church wall all together, like the Punch and Judy ghosts of remembered days, and there were badgers and nightingales and vulgar crows and hares and wild geese and falcons and fishes and dogs and dainty unicorns and solitary wasps and corkindrills and hedgehogs and griffins and the thousand other animals he had met. They loomed round the church wall, the lovers and helpers of the Wart, and they all spoke solemnly in turn. Some of them had come from the banners in the church, where they were painted in heraldry, some from the waters and the sky and the fields about–but all, down to the smallest shrew mouse, had come to help on account of love. Wart felt his power grow.

“Put your back into it,” said a Luce (or pike) off one of the heraldic banners, “as you once did when I was going to snap you up. Remember that power springs from the nape of the neck.”

“What about those forearms,” asked a Badger gravely, “that are held together by a chest? Come along, my dear embryo, and find your tool.”

A Merlin sitting at the top of the yew tree cried out, “Now then, Captain Wart, what is the first law of the foot? I thought I once heard something about never letting go?”

“Don’t work like a stalling woodpecker,” urged a Tawny Owl affectionately. “Keep up a steady effort, my duck, and you will have it yet.”

A white-front said, “Now, Wart, if you were once able to fly the great North Sea, surely you can co-ordinate a few little wing-muscles here and there? Fold your powers together, with the spirit of your mind, and it will come out like butter. Come along, Homo sapiens, for all we humble friends of yours are waiting here to cheer.”

The Wart walked up to the great sword for the third time. He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard.

I also enjoyed a Greek feast at Zenon Taverna with Jordan and Ann, ramen at Menchanko-Tei, swung a cow in Rayman Raving Rabbids, and installed a brand new operating system. Saw a few movies, too:

Blind Mountain/Mang shan. Li Yang, 2007. ***
Funny Games. Michael Haneke, 1997. **
Funny Games U.S. Michael Haneke, 2007. **
Love Songs/ Les Chansons d’amour. Christophe Honoré ***
My Blueberry Nights. Wong Kar Wai, 2007. ***
Sleep Dealer. Alex Rivera, 2008. **
Water Lillies/Naissance des pieuvres. Céline Sciamma, 2007. **
plus The Wire. Season 2 **** and Prime Suspect 5 ****

Hard-working German actor Jürgen Vogel plays the serial rapist Theo in Matthias Glasner’s almost unbearably grim The Free Will (Der Freie Wille). When we meet Theo, he’s heavy-set and angry, working at the cafeteria of a seaside youth hostel. Within minutes of the film’s beginning, he spots a potential victim, knocks her off a bicycle and drags her into the dunes, where he ties her up, rips off her clothes, beats and rapes her in a brutal sequence that seems designed to weed out those audience members who won’t have the stomach for what’s to come.

When we see Theo again, nine years later, he seems profoundly changed: with a buff body but a docile and contrite manner, he tells his parole board just what they need to hear to release him. Told in handheld scenes with an authentic, documentary feel, Der Freie Wille unflinchingly observes Theo’s struggle to contain his own aggressive desires and insecurities.

Glasner’s script manages to steer clear of any move that could be construed as making excuses for Theo as we follow the tortured paths he takes through the provincial German town, including harrowing scenes in which he follows random women through subway tunnels and darkened streets. Der Freie Wille takes a surprising turn when we’re introduced to Nettie (the striking Sabine Timoteo), a young woman who is just leaving behind her overbearing father.

The brittle love that blossoms between Theo and Nettie is the film’s thorniest conceit. We’re trained to wish happiness on all screen couples, but the heavily fraught intimacy we become a party to here is exceedingly difficult to watch. In fact, without the eye-opening performances by Vogel and Timoteo, the film is impossible to imagine: they don’t seem to be afraid to lay bare their very souls.

Glasner softens the blows with moments of fragile joy, but this is not a film that harbors any illusions that love will conquer all. No doubt, Der Freie Wille goes places where not everybody will want to follow, but it stays emotionally true to its frightful subject and finds moments of startling honesty at the extremes of what audiences can endure.

Benten Films will release The Free Will on DVD in the U.S. later this year.

Der Freie Wille. Matthias Glasner, 2006. ****

• Review in Der Spiegel
• The trailer:

“You’ve got a serious artist crush,” Marcy remarked — a statement, not a question — when I sent her a link to a gallery of adorably geeky photographs of Paul Thomas Anderson during the Hard Eight period. Guilty as charged: I’ve been rewatching and reassessing and obsessing over all five of PTA’s films, reevaluating Punch-Drunk Love (which I originally hated), rediscovering the ending of Boogie Nights (much different from what I remembered), and unable to resist the pull of Magnolia even on a matchbox-sized iPod screen.

Sez Dennis Lim:

If the Altman comparisons seem grossly reductive, it’s because Anderson is liberal when it comes to borrowing from the greats. Why not combine Altman’s panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick’s formal bravura with John Cassavetes’ messy candor? While Anderson fits the profile of a “hysterical realist,” to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He’s a born showman—his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit “A P.T. Anderson picture”—but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.

Lim’s entire appreciation of Anderson is spot-on, and before I swipe his video clips, I’d just like to expand on his last point: seems to me, the unifying theme underlying all of Anderson’s films is the desperate need for human connection. Yes, that’s a cloying phrase, and perhaps that’s why it’s dressed up in such unlikely garb: the incendiary monologues, the sweeping steadycams, the assaultive music, the undulating colors. What all of Anderson’s characters really need is a family, but their real families rarely work: in Hard Eight, Jack’s father is dead, Dirk Diggler’s mom throws him out, everybody in Magnolia is messed up six different ways, Barry Egan’s seven sisters are worse than the furies, and we all know that Daniel Plainview’s an oilman, not a family man.

Instead, Anderson’s heroes create impromptu families. Jack finds a father figure in his father’s killer, porn gives Diggler not just a dad (Burt Reynolds) but a sister (Heather Graham) and a mother (Julianne Moore), too. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler and Emily Watson start their own family, and Magnolia ends in an orgy of characters coming home to each other. And Plainview? His salvation would have been an impromptu family with a bastard from a basket for a son and a brother who wasn’t his brother-from-another-mother. That he refused them is the tragedy of There Will Be Blood.

Can’t leave you without another word about Anderson’s breathtaking audacity, and you better believe I’m lazy enough to quote Lim again:

The prominent bursts of music—and the way the narratives rely on musical principles like rhythm, tone, and phrasing—result in a kind of delirious synesthesia. His movies set off a crazy multitude of sensory triggers, leaving the impression that Anderson is working from a larger palette than most filmmakers.

Yes indeed.

Hard Eight/Sydney. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996. ***
Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997. ****
Magnolia. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. ****
Punch-Drunk Love. Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002. ****
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

More from Stu VanAirsdale, who kept notes on his marathon Anderson retrospective. After the jump, videos with choice clips from Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love.

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