Pennington Writing

Directed by Michael Ritchie

Known for it’s innovative ski sequences (including a newly built helmet camera), The Downhill Racer is a film with character, not only in its attempt to capture a slice of life, but also through aesthetic and sound design.

Not matching today’s standards as the most innovative film in terms of storytelling, what director Michael Ritchie (Flecth, Wildcats, The Candidate) does best is create a film that speaks to documentary form.  Forced to shoot real skiing in order to make the footage look the best, and feel the best, Ritchie incorporates a strong documentary style to accomplish an almost cinema verite style.

The film is about the danger and recklessness of downhill ski racers, particularly of David Chappallett (Robert Redford).  Coach Gene Hackman is there to keep Chappallett in line, but the film follows a traditional story about someone chasing a dream and the love and jealousy that follows suit.

For anyone who has grown up ski racing, especially to see what it has developed into, it is amazing to see what these guys where once capable of doing on what seems like reckless equipment.  But besides all these feets and the interesting fast cut editing style and stunning alpine photography, it is the subtlety in the script that amazes me.

Based on a Oakley Hall novel and adapted by James Salter, the storyline picks up on the subtlety of ski racing, from the problems with the coaches, to the arrogance of the athletes, all the way through to the politics of funding, the pressure of the Olympics, and lastly, the issue of whether a coach feels like he wins or if the athlete wins the race.  Done with out melodramatics, Downhill Racer is a prime watch for anyone interested in watching one of the original ski movies.

Directed by Michael Ritchie

As a metaphor for modern capitalism and politics, primitive violence and power drives the plot of 1980 thriller, The Island.

Starring a middle aged Michael Caine as Blair Maynard, this film falls into the aesthetic of the ‘80’s where violence was used to create a discourse around how media is viewed in what was an increasingly modernized world.  The film is about a reporter who is investigating disappearing boats in the Caribbean.  The boats are disappearing because a group of pirates are robbing, looting, and killing all the people aboard.

When Caine finally is captured by the pirates himself along with his son, the power struggle begins.  The island is controlled by John David Nau (David Warner), a power driven dictator who disguised the Pirates politics as democracy.  Maynard is issued to stay with the wife of the man he has killed while being captured, while his son becomes a surrogate to Nau and an expert marksman on the Island.

The plot plays in a traditional sense of a thriller, but it is the metaphor of freedom, politics, and capitalism, that make the film more than a thriller, and a decent flick from the beginning of the ‘80’s.

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Sympathy for the Devil was originally called, 1+1=2. However, the movie was banned and never released, but I think under contract, Godard had to re-edit the film to release something, so he shot the Rolling Stones working on a song called, “Sympathy for the Devil,” and used some of the footage for his film during different sections of the overall piece.

This about all I know about this film, and I heard it from my friend Michael in a bar.  So if any of what I have said is wrong, it is because I misheard him, not because he had the story wrong.  Basically, the film feels like two different films- a very Marxist and socially aware film, as well a rock-documentary, so I thought it worth sharing the small bit I knew about it.  Worth a very deep watch, as all Godard should be, but also understandable to throw on- any Godard is better than no Godard, even if no-one will watch the film in its entirety, everyone should know about it.

Directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

Why is Daniel Johnston popular?  Is he an enigma, autistic genius, or WTF?

Either way, homeboy wrote songs with more passion, guts and grit, than most songwriters in history, and I think that is what people admire about Daniel Johnston; he was uncompromising and relentlessly focused on one goal- to make it big.

Directed by Jeff Feuerzeig, the film has incredible breadth.  Spanning a life time of Daniel’s work, including early super 8mm footage of Daniel, family photo’s, Daniel’s music recordings, and drawings, all mediums configure into this melting pot of a film that is layered with complexity and one man’s self-expression.

What I enjoyed most about the film was seeing how a person was able to do what they love, no matter the cost, and how different it all was from every other story.  Daniel’s narrative could not be more mysterious, like one of those a magician never reveals his tricks type deal.

He lived at home, he drew, wrote tunes, shot little movies.  Eventually got taken up by a carnival and then ended up in Austin after the carnie had packed up and left him behind.  He stays in Austin, stops playing piano and picks up a guitar, works at the local McDonald’s, and then becomes a kind of local folk hero to the city of Austin.

He was making tapes in a garage, and had no way of duplicating his work, so he would re-record and re-draw the cover every time he made a tape.  I mean, just to watch this story unfold at the hand of Feuerzeig and the intimate interviews he has with the people close to Daniel, is pure enjoyment, especially for anyone who likes music.

One tid-bit I found very interesting was the artwork of Daniel’s first tape, “Hi, How Are You?” ended up being a very famous T-shirt, due to the fact Kurt Cobain was pictured wearing it on numerous occasions.  As explained in the movie, what is most ironic is that Daniel probably never listened to Cobain, because he just did not listen to music.  Another enigmatic feature of Daniel Johnston.

But besides a great musician flick, what this film also does is explore the inner-workings of mental illness, and the effects this has on the people closest to the victim.  The tenderness shown by Daniel’s parents, as well as the tremendous turmoil it caused in their family structure, gives the film more depth than a movie about a mysterious musician.  In this sense, the film steps out of its own shoes, and tries to go deeper than just chronicling a career.  Of course there is issues, but I don’t want to take with heed with those, that is for the real critics.

Directed by Nanette Burstein

“Access, camera, and shoot,” should be the motto for documentary filmmaking in this new digital age.  Because with enough footage and access to any interior life, as well as a good editor, the personal stories of people and their interior lives has publicly become entertainment, which is hopefully leading to enlightenment, or in other words, understanding and tolerance, not criticism and scorn.

My point is this, with enough access to personal stories, the individual can express, in the words of Thoreau, “a simple and sincere account of their own life,” and as a result, we can have a better understanding of humanity.  And throughout history, the most misunderstood realm of society is the American Teen.

In her movie, American Teen, Ms. Burstein has pleasantly depicted American teenagers in a more hospitable fashion.  She spent a year in Warsaw, Indiana, and shot over 1,000 hours of footage to create a documentary in which teenagers and their horrible decisions is observed with passion and consideration.

Following five seniors in their last year of High School, Burstein almost recreates a modern Breakfast Club, and even plays with this iconography by shooting a poster for the movie in which all the characters are dressed up as characters from the film in the infamous pose.  There is the popular jock and star of the Basketball team, the nerdy dungeons and dragon geek, the student council and popular know-it-all cheerleader, the artistic girl who sits on the outskirts, and another popular jock who is the lady killer.

But what makes this documentary worth watching is the way in which the characters are dealt with compassion and each given a chance to, despite their obvious shortcomings and dumbass choices, explain themselves and tell their stories to someone who is willing to listen and tell the truth about the situation.  Burstein takes pride in not sensationalizing the teens and deals with issues like sex, alcohol, family pressures, vengefulness, popularity, without making them melodramatic.

Although the film does fall trap to the fact that it is going to follow suit of an American way of life that exists without exactly creating a discussion of class discrepancies, what it does do is delve into the complex and utterly useless formative years that everyone looks back on and says, WTF?  There is some class discrepancy, but acts more as a backdrop and stage, than an actually discursive trope.

I am overall impressed with Burstein’s work and most amazed by the access she had to these students.  Sometimes questioning how she was in these situations, and wondering how much provocation was used, I also wonder about her side of the story of making the film, and the challenges and ethical problems she found in dealing with subjects around the age of 18 who legally and illegally engage behavior that most of us coming from a similar background did.  But at the same time, this is why I admire the film so much.  Here is an interview with Nanette, which addresses some of these issues.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/nanette-burstein,14277/

Directed by Patrice Leconte

Only the French can make a film that starts with a seven-minute monologue of the main character answering questions in front of an unknown audience or tribunal.  The shot is at first straight on and then reveals an audience listening in.

Adele (Vanessa Paradis) sits in a black and white mid-shot.  An off-screen female asks her questions and encourages her, “Go on Adele, tell us.”  The questions are phrased in a presumptuous manner and attempt to guide Adele to answer in such a way that she see herself a victim, or to show empathy towards her.  But this dialogue driven scene not only reveals back-story and narrative trajectory; it also reveals who our main character is, and why we should care for her; she does not see herself as a victim and she answers the questions not for any motive except to tell it the way it is to her.  Her outlook and life attitude is somewhat fatalistic and full of despair; however, the way in which she answers the questions leaves a glimmer of hope that signals the fact that the predetermination of life is just as fleeting as the tears of her past that have stained her face.

The questions hint towards the fact that Adele should be seen as a victim, as someone who has been taken advantage of and brought to her knees by the disadvantages and inequalities of society.  But Adele answers the question calmly, and matter-of-factly contradicts the guided questions.  For instance, when the questioner asks about why she dropped out of school to be with a boy, saying, “You wanted to be free?”  And our heroine would answer, “Actually no, I just wanted to sleep with him,” and she would then go on to explain one of her simple interpretations of what she had experienced.

This first scene, I enjoyed terribly.  As a viewer, you can tell that by extension and length, the director Patrice Leconte is really trying to show us something to give insight in to the flick.  It does more than set the stage; it sets a mood and tone, and expresses a theme that deals with luck, fate, and how these ephemeral notions weigh greatly on each and every individual.

After this initial scene of Adele explaining how her despair and bad luck brought her to attempt to huck herself off a bridge, the movie begins.  As she inches closer, a man’s voice off-screen says, “I think you are about to make a big mistake.”  The two have an off-kilter conversation that eventually leads to them (after a few major events) to discuss whether or not we have control over our destiny and what role luck plays in all of these metaphysical themes.

As it turns out, our male protagonist, Gabor (Daniel Auteuil) is a knife thrower and actually looks for lonely and desperate women who are about to kill themselves to recruit for his shows.  Thus, how he found Adele on the bridge.  But the film does not simply follow its laid out trajectory at this point, and like any good movie, it explores conflict and power struggles by changing the viewers mind about how they view the characters and who they are aligned with.  In other words, what our initial thoughts about who holds the power, who is more sturdy, etc, becomes inverted, not only once, but a few times.  In this sense, the character development’s intent is to show the complexity of life itself and evade the simplicity of how we view relationships, especially sexual ones.

In the case of our two main characters, sometimes a sexual relationship does not even involve the sexual aspect, but instead focuses on the power struggles and desire involved with becoming close and trusting someone.  The Leconte is able to convey this symbolically through the metaphor of knife throwing.

The desire and tension is doubly expressed in the knife-throwers attempt to complete his task at one point blind.  With Adele behind the sheet, not being able to see her creates a strong tension of desire and suspense, something that is immediately mirrored in the director’s form.  The close-ups of Gabor and the crowd shots, as well as Adele’s release of ecstasy and jouissance each time a knife is thrown, could not be more linked to an act of sexual pleasure.

Why I think Lecomte has done such a good job, not only for following in the footsteps of a long French tradition of exploring desire cinematically, but also for his attempt to make the most sexual moments in the film have the least amount of sex in them, a very noble gesture.  What I mean is, the knife throwing scenes tend to be more sexual than Adele’s sexual exploits, despite her naiveté to make these escapades be more genuine.

In this sense, the director has cleverly made a statement; sexual desire is everywhere, not just in the traditional sense of intimacy and intercourse.  He uses his art of choice—cinema, to explore how these moments become a typifying experience of life and relationships.

directed by Peter Bogdanovich

It’s amazing that in 1971, a film could be handled with such class and still deal with issues of sex in small-town America, all the while avoiding cliché and sensationalism.  For this reason, Bogdanovich is the man.  He started out early on in the Golden era of American Cinema in the 1970’s, and made a film that had feeling and intent to deal with themes in depth, that were only glazed over in mainstream cinema.

Spanning a longer time frame without signaling the passage of time, Bogdanivich moves the film right along from scene to scene, letting his themes come through as naturally as life itself.  Through this approach, the film is able to be critical of ritualistic practices, and deals admirable with sex as one of these day-to-day life occurrences, as opposed to over-dramatic, or melodramatic scenes.

Producing some of the most iconic images of early American pop-cinema history, Bogdanivich is able to craft these pictures without explosions and highly produced glam.  This is not to say that this film was not expensive for its time, or that movies back then were generally more dull anyway, but my point is that this film does what American cinema can not accomplish anymore; and that is make a movie on the picture itself.

Shot in black and white and using the Texas landscape as a way to comment on town life, the simplicity in full-shot framing gives the film a minimalist tone.  Not trying to hard to make the scenes tell the viewer about the problems, but attempting to show through gesture just how powerful the human rapport is, power struggles in sexual relationships is mostly the dominant theme.

Our main character, Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), is a local boy in Texas whom the audience is aligned with.  The film follows him through the narrative arc and growing pains of a young man in a small town.  Dealing with everything from death, to sex, to war, the film spans a couple years and does not hold the viewers hand to tell them whether or not a month, week, or a day has passed.  Spanning such a long period of time also allows Bogdanovich to cordially deal with the issues he sees as relevant and mostly marginalized in mainstream.

In this sense, Bogdanovich’s American classic still holds cultural relevance, and it is this timelessness that demarcates it as such, a real classic.

directed by Kathryn Bigelow

One of four women directors to be nominated for an academy award, Kathryn Bigelow is up against sure-shot James Cameron. No light weight her self; Bigelow was married to James Cameron, which seemed to be a working relationship. Cameron wrote the script for Bigelow’s 1995 movie, Strange Days.

But to her own right, the deeply poetic and sincere attempt to portray the French novel, The Weight of Water, (starring Sean Penn, Catherine McCormack, and Elizabeth Hurley) successfully works as a period piece that also takes place in the present moment. Through this type of authorial direction, she is able to write with her camera, as a writer, a novel.

In the French cinema tradition, Alexander Astruc first wrote about la camera-stylo, or in English, the camera-pen. This notion was to draw the correlation between the respect authors/writers achieved, and correlate to film directors. In this sense, Bigelow has certainly shown her penmanship for craft.

The Hurt Locker, her portrayal of bomb diffusers in Iraq and Afghanistan, was finished in 2008. SSG William James (Jeremy Renner), our main character, carries the stress of his character well, and wins his audiences heart by his approach. At one point shedding his bomb suit to diffuse a trunk load of bombs because if he is going to die, he wants to die comfortable, shows the twisted-ness of diffusing bombs.

Although a bit glorifying, the film does a good job of showing how a normal life is sacrificed when a person takes on a job like this and is good at it. I think the fact that a woman directed this is what makes the film so surprising for the American film market. The homo-erotic overtones are definitely prevalent, but the reigning sentiment of nationalism and American pride is unmistakable.

Bigelow’s films generally run with themes of machismo but I am unsure if they are critical or perpetuating. Either way, she is getting films made, and is pretty darn good at it.

directed by James Cameron

It’s almost the Oscars. And it just would not be any fun to watch a movie sweep the awards that you personally have not experienced. The 3-D phenomenon is most likely here to stay, with James Cameron yet again at the helm of changing the face of Hollywood. The guy is a pro.
With a tinge of romanticism, the movie’s story is not what makes it the most amazing movie this year. However, what makes this film such a landmark in cinema history is not only the fact that it is the highest grossing film, but that the 3-D is legit. This is not some Michael Jackson Space Odyssey at Epcot Center gimmicky type shit. I felt the 3-D was taking movies to the next step by creating an atmosphere. The only thing left to really up the experience would be smell.
In this sense, Avatar became an instant hit because it did not try to play on conventions that the 3-D in the Coke factory does, or a place like Disney World might. For me, it was the leaves falling; it was the forest, and the depth of image that was the most successful aspect of the virtual world, and what a better flick than Avatar to be the film to launch this new realm of cinema; symbolic in content, through form.
There is probably no better director than James Cameron. I don’t really want to give the guy a hand-job, but honestly, he is dominant. Just as Titanic ran the box-office, so has Avatar, and it is beyond a reasonable doubt that this film is deserving. The technical feats are stunning.
However, I do have to re-iterate that this film is not amazing on raw cinematic tropes. It follows a very classical narrative, plays with tension and suspense, demarcates good and evil, and like every film, has character development and change. But I don’t want to dwell on that stuff, there are enough other reviews out there that are much more in depth and better written than what I have to say.
But, can we talk about homeboy eating the full pizza? I saw this picture on the articles blog ( http://articlescollective.blogspot.com/2010/01/do-you-have-avatar-blues.html).  These guys and gals do a great job down there and find some funny shit, so I figured I would pass on the favor and show how Avatar is really impacting our culture. This is no joke- for sure.

Directed by David Wain

Could this film be any more formulaic?  But, does that really matter?  Some say there is only one story anyway, and the rest is just particulars.

What I mean is, this film is not intelligent in its story and character development, as well as its narrative arch, and it mostly plays with convention.  I could not believe that Paul Rudd could play the same character he continues to play in I Love You Man (2009), and still be as funny each time.  But that is what particulars do.  Good acting, good rapport, and timing, make the film’s humor successful.

So despite convention and the fact that the story line follows every other story line, the film’s execution is pro, and goddamnit, it’s pretty funny and attempts to prove the point that we should be happy with our lives, because the only thing that really matters is a healthy heterosexual relationship.

To summarize the story, Danny Donahue (Paul Rudd) is a thirty something guy who has a dead end job selling energy drinks to kids.  His extremely beautiful and successful lawyer girlfriend, Beth (Elizabeth Banks), is fed up with his negativity and dumps him, which sends him on a spiral to up-end his job, and completely come to the conventional abandonment of all friends and hope.

After a mishap, Danny is facing jail time with his co-worker and ladies man, Wheeler (Seann William Scott).   The two are assigned to be role models for an organization so they can stay out of jail, run by Gayle Sweeney (Jane Lynch).  What follows is Danny’s journey to turn his life around, and win his girlfriend back.  So there is the story, very universal in the sense that this narrative arch has been told throughout the history of Hollywood, and about the only thing it is missing is a touch football game (which, however, is replaced by a game based on NERO I beliebve—called LAIR in the movie—a live action role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons).

If what makes this movie successful is the particulars, then what is so important about that and what can we learn from it?  What Hollywood ideology would like us to believe is that the story is more important.  The point I am trying to make is that the driving message that a successful heterosexual relationship will make you happy in your career and will trump all other issues, is undercut by the fact the story doesn’t matter as much because it is told so many times that it is deflated.  In this way, the important thing is the details, the little pieces that will eventually make the whole, not the whole itself.  Chemistry, how people interact, life in the moment, makes the film successful.  In other words, the small is what’s working to communicate on a level for all to understand, and that comes from the individual, not from the institution that produces it.