dennis-11345 Reviews

Joan Baez I Am a Noise (2023)

The level of candor in Joan B's "I Am a Noise"

[10/10 · 15 October 2023]

At Friday's premiere here in LA, where Joan and one of her three directors were interviewed, I couldn't stop wondering if the admiring throng of young people grasped (as her director put it at the end): she still stands for freedom and struggle, but it's been lifted to a different level.

This is not the illusion of candor, the gloss of self-serving authenticity, or a carefully curated story of personal growth. This is the real deal, based on journals, home movies, tape recordings, interviews, and private artwork.

Back in the day, did we realize we were lost in the fog of fame as well as the fog of war? With fresh cinematography and subtle narrative structure, "I Am a Noise" blows away a lot of fog at a lot of levels.

Monica (2022)

Soul Growth

[10/10 · 22 May 2023]

Synchronicity brings me another film of soul growth. No doubt about that. No doubt it's unique. And no doubt I'll be slow finding words. The director and lead actress will be at tonight's showing. I'll just jump ahead now and suggest you add this to your list.

The film is deeply, and I want to say uniquely, sincere. And non-verbal. There's a flow of subtle feeling, along with familiar emotions. A lot is happening through veering away from, or toward, cultural expectations. Even so, in the writing, the acting, and the cinematography there's a complete lack of rhetoric, or attention-grabbing, or self-conscious brush strokes. (Like a Vermeer: no visible brushstrokes.) Music comes from the camera: the light, the shifting angles, and the distance. (Huh! That's also Vermeer.) Grace enters mysteriously. (Also.)

Marshall Shaffer has written a sensitive review.

Mary Magdalene (2018)

What does it feel like?

[10/10 · 16 August 2022]

Early in the film, Mary Magdalene asks Jesus what does it feel like? You'll have to watch the film to learn his answer, partly because I don't think this line has any historical basis. Even so, it's positively brilliant because, in a flash, it shows the fundamental difference between her and the other disciplines. She has a natural curiosity about his state of consciousness. Initially she's the only disciple that gets the revolution. And now that we have the work of scholars like Cynthia Bourgeault and others, we can also get ourselves pointed in the right direction.

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (2021)

In a world that cannot be made sense of

[9/10 · 5 July 2022]

"You look around and you see a world that cannot be made sense of. You either raise your fist or you say hallelujah. I try to do both." Both, simultaneously! So Cohen's song "Hallelujah" arises from the same place as the poem "Thanks" by W. S. Merwin. The raised fist is the easy part.

This requires an almost incomprehensible level of compassion and appreciation. It's beyond emotion, mood, attitude. It's not a product of mind or will. Perhaps it only arrives with age, when mind and will are starting to appreciate their limits.

Back in the old days, I had thought Leonard Cohen was just one more phony. Or as we would say now: the songs, the voice, the attire: it's just performative, just brand-building. Well, I was wrong.

Bitterbrush (2021)

a transcendent film about work

[9/10 · 18 June 2022]

You might really like this documentary. Two gals herding cattle grazing on BLM land in the high country somewhere in Idaho, maybe the Sawtooth Range. Stars include three horses and about ten wonderful dogs. At first the music might come as a surprise, and then you realize it's a perfect choice. Add this to your list of transcendent films about work.

Petite Maman (2021)

Extreme Embodiment

[10/10 · 17 April 2022]

At first it's not obvious that Céline Sciamma's new film, Petite Maman (2021), is made by the same person who created Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Then you realize the total embodiment of the characters, including the children. It's almost as if they were dancing. And the depth of what could be called her "field of compassion."

After Yang (2021)

What word means the opposite of reductive?

[10/10 · 7 March 2022]

Opened last night. Something was happening in his first film, Columbus (2017). As if architecture was slow dancing with quiet feelings, thereby throwing light on the whole of felt sense. As if Kogonada had discovered something new about images. (Or had been communing with ascended Ozu and Tarkovsky.) After Yang is more glorious, more delicate. And at the same time, it seems to be a new species of inquiry. No judgments. Just pervasive kindness. A deeper viewing requires a more sensitive me.

The second view was still infected with clichés, judgments, comparisons, and other verbal claptrap.

On the third I slipped in, as if through an unlocked screen door.

Spencer (2021)

a well of sadness that extends far beyond Diana

[10/10 · 8 November 2021]

Dear Friend,

I got nothin' out of Pablo Larraín's "Jackie" (2016), but ... Spencer! Holey moley! There's a smooth never-ending flow of genres: dream, fantasy, nightmare, memory, myth, existential horror, haunted house horror, body horror, crime, macabre humor, family drama, family fun, social drama, feminist critique...

In the past this post-modern genre-switching has annoyed the heck out of me. But last night I felt a beating heart in one wrenching scene. When I saw the film again this afternoon the soundtrack, camerawork, and choreography; the tones and moods of genre: it all combined to open up a vast well of sadness, extending far beyond Diana. I couldn't have imagined those tears on the first viewing.

The film is dance-like. Symphonic. Operatic in the best sense. Kristin was interviewed after. The audience gave both her and the film an astonishingly cool reception. Consider seeing it on a big screen if possible.

Gunda (2020)

A Miracle of a Film

[10/10 · 13 December 2020]

At first, we can't grasp what we are seeing, and it takes a while to sink in. Throughout the film, both beauty and reality will often rise up to temporarily disorient, take our breath away, and even overwhelm.

This is not your cute animal film, though it has that too. It's more akin to those moments of serenity and joy that can arise when we are watching babies move or small children explore. We feel both intimacy and otherness, and perhaps even bewilderment.

In my imagination it doesn't seem impossible that this film could be nominated for awards beyond Best Documentary. It would need its own version of Script Writing, Choreography, Directing, Editing, and Producing.

But the Cinematography! Obviously it's often spontaneous and even seat-of-the-pants. Somehow there is an endless outpouring of breath-taking photographic moments in high-resolution black and white. Will there be a picture book?

It's not that the shots are a miracle of technique; I'm sure they are. It's more how they touch such a wide range of feeling. A world is created and then ...

Like the beginning, the ending takes a while to sink in. Hushed. Eye and heart, conscience and consciousness, awakened.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Feels like yearning

[9/10 · 6 September 2020]

For the first time, just saw "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" by Charlie Kaufman, who is playing a new keyboard. Many familiar keys (Beckett, Lynch, Tarkovsky, Tarr, Chris Marker, etc.) along with some strange keys, are these his own? First impression, he has taken a deeply spiritual turn, damn near Buddhist. Just trying to escape the chaotic surface (drop categories, accept instability, see clearly), looking for a few small moments of genuine kindness. Feels like a pervasive sadness (but more pain than Mulholland Drive). Feels like yearning.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2019)

"The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot."

[10/10 · 28 August 2020]

This film might speak to you, or whisper to you. As with any film by Werner Herzog, it lives in feelings and images, not words. As a first approximation you could think of it as an exploration of some different forms of strangeness: anthropological, mythical, archeological. But it's not a scientific search for explanations. Essentially it asks: "What IS this!?!?" More a yearning than a search. A yearning for visceral contact with what, in our species, is ancient, mysterious, and possibly glorious.

Quotations: Werner Herzog: "The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot." The last sentence Bruce Chatman wrote: "Christ wore a seamless robe." Chatwin's biographer and editor of his letters, Nicholas Shakespeare: "He tells not a half-truth but a truth and a half."

Capernaum (2018)

That's not muddy, that's love.

[10/10 · 15 May 2020]

The morning after the first viewing, I realized that there were two dimensions to the film, the first being the story, the second being the relationship to, let's call it, hard reality. In the second viewing this other dimension was where, or how, the emotion was silently accumulating.

I suppose most reviewers will see the film as a fumbled attempt at realism. I'm sure other reviewers will use one of these standard words to include that other dimension of the film: magical realism, fantasy, whimsy, etc. And they might feel that this doesn't fit the hard reality of the story.

I'd love to see the film again, but I think the brilliance of the director is that she creates a flow of styles of realities, for which we just don't have a word, partly because it's so saturated with so many different unnamable emotions. The movement in the film is a movement of the heart, Nadine Labaki's heart, and in her heart these different "levels" or "types" of reality are all one. That's not muddy, that's love.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Touched in Two Ways

[9/10 · 5 January 2020]

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood touches me through the innocence and wonderment of my own little one. I watch again through his eyes. And, like many people, I am moved by the earnestness and Christ-like goodness of a mature soul like Fred Rogers. He sees a higher self in a character that we, in the audience, dismiss is an incurable jerk.

My Friend the Polish Girl (2018)

Two Souls Meeting on a Spiritual Desert

[9/10 · 10 December 2019]

Two souls meeting on what feels like a dry and uninviting desert. Staying with the film. Slowly following the arc of their learning. Slowly sensing how much of that learning is beyond their (and my) awareness. By the end, both are granted a moment of great depth.

As with The Souvenir (2019, Joanna Hogg), the film has a privacy and rhythm that doesn't make things easy for the viewer but that ultimately feels vastly more life-like than films that are constructed to appear life-like.

Leaning Into The Wind (2017)

Beyond cairns

[21 July 2019]

Those stacks of stones on the beach, perfectly balanced: they are called cairns. The word comes from Scottish Gaelic. Andy Goldsworthy has lived and worked in Scotland most of his life touching, not just stones, but also leaves and fallen trees, moss and ice and wind. In the process, he has developed an art form that seems more Buddhist than anything partly because it is constructed from detritus and is so ephemeral. His work will stay with you a long time.

Our Time (2018)

A slow accumulation of subtle feelings

[9/10 · 1 July 2019]

Last month each viewing of The Souvenir lifted me one step into an aesthetic that I couldn't initially appreciate. And now it's happening again, with Our Time, by Carlos Reygadas. (The reviews on Metacritic are abysmally low.)

My first viewing, last night, was similar to that of at least one reviewer. In the middle of an interesting or puzzling shot, your heart breaks open and you haven't the faintest idea why. Has the spaciousness of the landscape prepared you? Or the passage of time? Or the tension? At the end (or in my case, as always, the next morning) you are left with such sadness. For...? For the human condition?

In his first sentence one reviewer calls the film "spiritual." Yes, at times wasn't there the sense of something beneath the surface, silent, all-embracing? Needs to be seen again.

The Souvenir (2019)

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. - Cheryl Strayed

[10/10 · 25 May 2019]

Unbearably sad and, as usual for me, fresh feeling emerges the next morning. I have never seen such a ... let's say "delicate" ... way of unfolding a story. (I felt a similar delicacy, and indeterminacy, in Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night.) It's like watching a monk doing Zen brush drawing: a touch of the brush here, a breath of the brush there: it all seems like it isn't going anywhere or adding up to anything, and it even starts seeming borderline incoherent, or borderline ugly. Until you step back and take in the whole. I hunger for the director's level of sensitivity: as if anything that comes from the mind is secondary and almost nothing at all comes from the everyday desire to paint a "relatable" character or tell an "exciting" story. Seems like she is coming from some very deep place. Makes me want to inhabit her through her film. I'll try again tonight.

Second viewing. She inhabits her film in a unique way, breathing into it a host of feelings: subtle, unnameable, flickering, perhaps transcendent. Summaries, like the one in Metacritic, are fine, but I don't think she made the film primarily because she wanted to tell that story. Her visual and narrative interests go far beyond character and story-telling. But how to describe this...? At some fundamental level, isn't this more about being with others? Or love?

Third viewing. For me, her energy and freshness are definitely in the "feeling" track. Here's one aspect of it: in this film, the first of a two-part series, almost every discussion and almost every setting is suffocating or dissatisfying, to some degree. The antidotes are the walk with the dogs through the countryside and the recurring image "trees with sky," which acquires the look of a painting. So part of the creative challenge in Part 1 is how to express that lack of connection -- and many other feelings -- without clichés of any kind. Letting feelings stay at the level of feeling.

Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018)

Trying and trying to re-inhabit a remembered love

[10/10 · 26 April 2019]

Have you ever found yourself wandering the corridors of your mind searching for someone you started to love perhaps ten or twenty years ago, before a disruption? Have you found yourself going "room to room" in memory? Or, in imagination, sketching variations of what could have happened? Or how you could still get together? The peculiar way time passes and doesn't, repeats and doesn't. Would she recognize you? Would you recognize her? And how would you describe what this longing tastes like? If you wanted to express this taste, this mood, could film be the medium of choice? Could film have the potential to be more poetic than poetry? How many conventions of box office narrative would you need to discard?

4.26.19 Here in LA no one is daring to compete with the release of Avengers Endgame. Except for Warriors vs. Clippers and a masterpiece from China: "A Long Day's Journey into Night" (misnomer). Seen it twice. For now let's just say: in a virtuosic display of movement, space, time, light, color, felt sense -- sprouting partly from some seeds scattered in Tarkovsky's Stalker -- it's the lived experience of the self as it tries and tries to re-inhabit a remembered love. Got plans for the weekend?