The Disaster Artist

Let's make a film.

Just write one up and shoot it.

Figure shit out on the fly.

Improvised panoramas.

Excelsior.

Incumbent deconstruction, the drive, the crew, the means, ecstatic Aberdeen, no questions asked, no answers given, just pure raw sutured cataclysm, supercilious sagacity, uncompromising desire, and opaque expertise.

For The Room, the team was assembled, it was undertaken with zero film production knowledge, conflicts inherently emerging between director/writer/producer/star/ . . . Tommy and those he had hired, a cult-classic aggregated through the mayhem, complete with rarefied mystifying endearing bewilderment.

Think things through?

Don't think things through, ye outcast with inexhaustible resources, many of Herzog's early films weren't that good, but some of them were, and he kept making more and more until he became a sought after phenom, morbidly obsessed with death and violence, doin' his thang, cultivatin' that groove.

Tommy needed someone, a friend, a pal, a partner, a confidant, he needed someone around to motivate him to do something, like ambient social energizing parlay, he found it while studying acting in San Francisco, in the form of an enthusiastic fellow student named Greg (Dave Franco), according to The Disaster Artist, which seems genuine if it isn't too commercial, anyways, he just needed that someone to talk to, one person, even if he was self-absorbed and unapproachable, he couldn't live the dream on his own, he needed another, a self-sustaining uplifting bromantic catalyst, which would have been tragic if he hadn't embraced the comedy.

The laughter.

I've never seen The Room nor made or been part of the making of a film, but I imagine its lauded receptions has helped its aggrieved creators overlook disputes impassioned on set.

Perhaps, with unlimited wealth, it would be wiser to study film before directing and writing and producing and acting in one, even if the prestige of the self-made auteur simultaneously excites while oppressing bohemians everywhere, but you can't beat the novelty of rash unrefined dedicated loose imagination, wildly conjuring with eclectic poise, self-destructing to salute freewill, as long as it's true to its ever widening vision, and not in charge of the world's largest military.

The Disaster Artist is a lot of fun.

It examines underground filmmaking through a critically sympathetic super bizarro lens that regards the traditionally foolish with legendary unheralded agency.

With respect.

Blending the creepy and the courageous with warm resolute congeniality, or campy contagion, it transforms shock into sensation, midnight into lounging afternoon praise.

Damned irrefutable.

Maps to the Stars

Is it possible to take a sterile excessive stale antiseptic and fill it with enough dry 40% neat conversations to soberly materialize a fumigated aesthetic, like sparkling versatile antithetical lard, an affordable Naked Lunch, its sacrificial form industriously high-strung, its intellectual content flowing with literary immiscibility, which, on the one hand makes you feel like insecticide, on the other, like a priceless set of handcrafted heirlooms, David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, a restrained hard-lined masterpiece of elitist horror, a subdued synthesis of the mundane and the maniacal, stronger than both Cosmopolis and A Dangerous Method, inflammable family histories, seductively liaising, emphatically, eviscerated?

It is, Cronenberg's patient strategic mix of obnoxious refinements, youthful misgivings, and childish incredulity, slowly building its complex web of serendipitous interconnectivity, makes you wish you were about to pleasantly throw up after having spent $627 dollars on a bottle of scotch, like gentrified gentility, frenzied fire starters, was that Mr. Mugs?, all-knowing and ever-so-loveable Mr. Mugs?, shot down by 21st century infantile ennui, prevented from teaching his lessons, consigned, forevermore?

Bashful, so difficult to blend these elements without being overtly pretentious or inadvertently condescending, still allowing them to preserve their autonomy, pulsating, integrated, heterogeneity.

It's somewhat of a satirical take on both these potentialities, expertly derelicted, by a master who continues to innovate.

Reminded me more of his early texts Stereo or Crimes of the Future than A History of Violence or Eastern Promises.

His roots.

Back to his roots.

Super 8

An exploratory mission crash lands in hostile territory. Detained then imprisoned, an adventurer is ruthlessly analyzed. One dissident voice seeks his or her freedom. Aided by a group of film making youths after sacrificing his life for socialized synchronies, his mission miraculously proceeds as they do everything within their power to combat their imperialist foes.

J.J. Abrams's Super 8 fictionalizes xenophobic agendas in order to symbolically expose their misguided agencies. Within, the exclusive factor seeks to know the other in order to capitalize on its difference through recourse to carcinogenic means. Secrets which likely would have been eagerly shared if a framework had been in place to encourage their dissemination are therefore resolutely withheld, and a progressive exchange of ideas is transformed into a bloodthirsty polemic.

The resistance proceeds unabated, breaking through manufactured manifests to pursue a personalized mission which becomes cultural after previously classified information materializes.

Friendships are tested as unforeseen circumstances and desires challenge their historical order of things.

The pursuit of love accidentally precipitates justice as modesty, courage, and wisdom are enlisted.

Inland Empire

Just finished David Lynch's Inland Empire and here are some initial impressions: the film begins by settling us into a darkly surreal landscape, reacquainting us with Grace Zabriskie who plays Laura Dern's portentous neighbour. She sets up the film's phantasmagorical relationship with linearity before fading into the background. Zabriskie is one of several characters whom I would have liked to have seen provided with a bigger role. In fact, my principle critique is the quality that I usually love so dearly within Lynch's texts: its weirdness. Rather than taking the time to firmly develop a number of characters throughout, Lynch introduces several characters, has them utter mysterious one-liners, and then trail off into the dreamscape. The mysterious nature of the film's compelling, kind of like an ontological detective story; but it would have been more so if we didn't lose Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Jeremy Irons and Grace Zabriskie half way through (Irons and Stanton return briefly near the end). Instead, Laura Dern liaises with a number of identities before disappearing and reappearing in a variety of different puzzling contexts, the realities of which are difficult to penetrate to say the least (do her multiple identities reflect an artistic actors torment, the feeling they acquire from trying to BE so many different people correctly, in the context of their various stories?), and the rest of the cast is forgotten. What made Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive so mesmerizing were the different characters caught up in the enigma, the different opaque perspectives within. Inland Empire suffers by not providing more of its principle characters with a chance to flesh out their identities, while, fittingly enough, the lead character experiences a severe crisis regarding her in/abilities to do so.