Dogville (2003)

Wot you gonna do with your societal dregs? Put it on stage to abstract its salient tropes, illuminating them to make your hopefully artful and not artsy, pretentious, representation. With Dogville, you might find the abstraction too much, set up to be minimalistic, or rather - bare - but "failing" with a reliance, ironically, on stylisation to make its point.

A woman on the run, Grace (Nicole Kidman), finds respite from her assailants in a small mountain township called Dogville. Moral philosopher and budding but unemployed writer Thomas Edison gives her this chance, doubly serving as a test of the town's generosity and overall moral goodness, a test they reluctantly endure even as it seems Grace is a criminal or maybe wanted by criminals. To sugar coat it, in the manner of the over the top voice-over narration, we follow the highs and lows of the townsfolk and their relationship with Grace, including a fair share of naughtiness and unpleasantness inbetween.

Underneath all the formalistic playfulness of being a giant Brechtian allusion, Dogville is nothing but von Trier at his mischievous best, exposing the nestled degradation at the heart of Third World America. Not to say that Dogville conflates the latter with the titular town and its depravity, but horror is known to hide behind religious repression when poverty triumphs. Juxtaposed against this, as the apparent main objective, is the slippery slope of moral rectitude.

Watching those cheap end credits, any feelings of disgust are amplified above the ironic Dickinsonian sentiment, bringing home the point more forcefully besides. These couple minutes of montage photography go straight for the jugular that a three hour "epic" sort of dragged along to despite itself. By the end, it's well worth the wait, but for its purpose, the film is an hour too long at least: one of the drawbacks of giving auteurship to genius brat filmmakers. Its ultimate suggestion may be the truth and therefore a suggestion most (maybe von Trier himself) would be sickeningly offended by: the debris of First World waste will probably be dealt with like any other long-standing problem ignored, now spun out of control: ruthless, efficient, and covert annihilation.

Adventure

There is only one heart, that of the Absolute, The Principium Supremis, Supremum Principium, that shineth in and without all things. Marijuana is a recreational drug that can take you to this state, even if the conservatively religious demonize it over-zealously.

You cannot be in a state of true transcendence if there is fear in your heart, for this is just one manifestation of part of the infinite series that is life in all forms. To know all states in one, to feel everything including the most extreme love and terror in effectively one instant (even if that instant is extrapolated or extended over real time). It is infact intensification and magnification of all thoughts, senses, intuitions, your physical hardware (brain) can process at once in a constantly time-shifted reality - from micro-rapid obsessive compulsive repetition to absolute peace and rest to hypersensitive hypochondria and insane-asylum paranoia - repeated ad infinitum so that normal constructive thought is not quite within reach. Somehow this state gives a peak of the possibility of a bright future or life that is in great balance, like normal reflection but sped-up seemingly infinitely, with enough terror and magnification of self-doubt that your real life can be summarized from various states of decisive mind in rapid succession and decisions can be made semi-consciously to later seep into sub-/liminal/normative- consciousness.

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Time in patches, like inkblots of reality on a canvas of earth with sky as reflection, spurted at leisure but with intent for divine structure, that which is greater than the limited self, slow from realization of his Atman and Brahman, in order of kind (meditate don't parse!). someone smoked a boat and knew it, feeling multiple emotions in variedly perceived time capsules of neurophysiological activity. even normal, wise, far-ahead looking self is perceived, seeing that drugs are portals to prisons if abused, and small doses spread out should be OK.
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It's the infinite circle of life crammed into a finite series that extends to infinity otherwise, but for the purpose contains the emotions and perspectives of all stages of life where the soul is free absolutely to choose its station, which is by default perfection. deep fear lurks beneath the broil like a serpent of mature insurrection, ready to destroy the meek flesh like razors over snails, trying to limit the limitless and contain the uncontainable. profane only in desire, gloriously divine in result and effect, this state is spiritually valid in that the death force is overcome in a way the soul manifest (lower series) previously could not enact. higher series of consciousness (like buddhist states of the series of nidhana) are realized once thence forever, only time itself relegating the experience to the finite.

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The mortal too scared to dream, both literally and metaphorically, because the horizon of death is peaked nearer than at younger age, in memory translucently threaded into nightmare for the uncouth to tremble. the nihilist observer stands coolly in consideration of cause and effect, affirming it in heart so the will can decide and act. from there, idealism shapes the world as far as our faculties can envision the highest states of being, then realism works at its correlation to reality itself, tweaking and sculpting where necessary, which should, if the previous step is carried out well, go smoothly. From there life takes over and you are hyper-aware of self and It of Itself.

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Endless march. life sometimes stops to take stock and eliminate absurdities before making the next iteration in a decision tree. not stops as in remove time and become nothingness (futile and empty) but check up on its own process in the abstract, the one that started when it (life) separated itself from non-existence. where and how the structure grows and shapes is determined by the level of accuracy within the branches of the current tree or subtree.

Burn After Reading (2008)

When the shit piles up, the secret intelligence men are there to do the cleaning, even if they're unable to interpret the mess themselves, whether it's important, or why the Russians are involved. Burn After Reading is marvelously crafted satire from the Coens that uses standard miscommunication comedy to mock the absurdity of trying to make sense of the senseless.

Intelligence analyst Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich) quits the CIA and decides to write his memoirs, which could be "quite explosive," but his material, along with possibly other top secret "raw intelligence," is found by stooges Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Francis McDormand) who use it to their best advantage. Meanwhile, Cox's pissed off wife Katy (Tilda Swinton) is screwing someone else's husband, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a dog that screws anything in a pair of heels, while Linda naively looks for love by screwing internet dateline losers. As Mr. Pfarrer finds out, the God of Mischief ensures all this is closely surveyed by Ozzie's former employers as they follow bogus leads to make mislead conclusions about mistaken identities.

Sounds maybe familiar, but the Coens execute the fine details of it with such precision it hardly matters, as subtext and suggestion build into explosive troughs and peaks of cynical, satirical hilarity. Somewhere in there is vague simile of agency and secret agents (on two separate occasions Linda innocuously but irritatedly screams "agent" at voice recognition machinery: mere cute wordplay?), the juxtaposition of intelligence and idiocy, positing that the real idiots are maybe higher up the chain of bureaucracy, and to top it all, taking the piss out of spy movies with "intricate" levels of miscommunication, misinformation, and misinterpretation of false signals.

The only thing Burn After Reading suffers from is a lack of a singular vision: it's about too many things, as themes are neatly set up and neatly payed off. In the end it has to cling on to this comedy of surveillance people happening upon a ball of shit rolled out of coincidental nonsense; but thanks to a stellar cast directed by great filmmakers we're kept in tears of laughter all the way through. Amidst the shitstorm, Cox hardly gets a chance to finish his memoirs, but, as dubious as it may sound, the film itself is a cynical misaccount of his tragedy (the only character with a forward looking goal, - SPOILER ALERT LOL - but his demise is a footnote). So what do we learn? "Jesus Fucking Christ."

Bad Liuetenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

A bad lieutenant lives the bad double life of a sort of crooked cop in the new south post-Katrina. He swindles for drugs, his "girl" is a prostitute, he manipulates criminals and idiots, but they probably deserve it, and he becomes a classic modernist anti-hero who pisses on the rules of a corrupt system, all the while keeping good faith and intent, yet corrupts himself in the process nonetheless.

Herzog's macabre motifs (reptiles, the ocean (invader), Nick Cage (his own kind of reptile)) are splattered here and there for appropriately bizarre and eerie effect. The effect, finally, is one of a narcotic high that comes down better than it should. Or does it? When a man sees he can't escape his own fate: then what?

As of this writing, of all living, recently working directors, only Werner Herzog can operate in this kind of subliminal space with any serious merit, taking a mundane story with little existential will, and turn it into his unique brand of sublime without a hint of flashy stupidity. Stupidity there is, but it's of a knowing, measured, seasoned kind that is magnificently absurd, as opposed to plain idiotic, like CSI: NY.

Death Proof (2007)

This movie is so fucking cool I watched it five times the first week I saw it, but...

Whatever the technical genius Quentin Tarantino brings to his joints, he can't escape the formula of unthinking entertainment to say anything of import or longevity. You realize this every time you detach from the violence and sexiness that pleases your monkey brain and ask yourself what the hell it is you're watching. When the end credits roll to mood heightening music with lyrics suggestive of the slippery slide of the male ego, you can all but applaud at how clever it is, but just as quick you might realize how empty this cleverness is, much like the pop song it employs as a shortcut to preconscious emotion. Your average film buff will have a giggle, but no matter how much I enjoy his stuff, I can't care enough to rate him as more than a "talented shit" with nothing to say.

Suckas!

Ghost World (2001)

Jaded cinephiles and rent-a-movie whores looking back to the classics of the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa, or (God be with us) Tarantino's grindhouse influences, may miss a few gems of the more recent past, none more so than Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, which on first viewing is as close to masterpiece as you can get for a film from this century.

Let's call it "arthouse comedy": be funny, smart, or interesting in some trivial but outlandish way, then be sad or generally dramatic in a twisty middle act, then conclude on some horseshit that either makes everyone feel better about themselves or else offer a falsely (read: dishonestly) ambiguous conclusion that "confuses" the slow kids -- art as a device of egoism to artist and consumer, a self gratifying lie dreamed by the former instructing the latter to agree, and feel clever doing so. In other words, pander to the neurotic complexes of your audience but be artsy about it - be a hipster. Superficially, Ghost World does all of these. In spirit, it does none of these, even if at times it's this close to being hypocritical in its critique of hipsterdom. It's hiply unhip, it's meta, it's art, even. It's brilliant.

When a couple of outsider teens (Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson) graduate from high school, they have to be "different" and not go to college like the other dorks, jocks, losers. What then? Well, lots, mostly jokes and pranks adding up to zilch, but we're young, so fuck it. One of the poor bastards (Steve Buscemi) at the other end of the stick turns out to be not as creepy as first thought (well, he does, but you can't help but like the idiot), leading to the central plot point: impossible and dumb love. If it sounds trite, it really isn't, and give Ghost World credit for handling it with aplomb. Even better, repeatedly, little plot threads meet, sometimes ingeniously, symbiotically, the best being a) the treatment of art as misrepresented in academia therefore high school and b) hidden racism in contemporary culture instructed by America's racist history, with the synergy of a + b causing controversy of the best kind.

Ghost World is masterfully executed, especially thematically. Shot for shot even. Playing out the existential crisis of teenage life in a time where everyone is clueless ("fuck everybody"), it dips in and out of well earned, Honest to Gods Transcendence. When it becomes clear our protagonist should stop pointing the finger and look at herself for a clue, the film draws from a well of the intangible but real wisdom of an artistic consciousness to make out of a lone wolf a humble heroine. It would be flippant to fault it for relying on the holy fool, as he knows best after all: be patient with your dumb ideas, wait for that ticket away from drama, then grab the bus en route to creation anew.

Une femme est un femme (1962)

Award winning Une Femme Est Une Femme has Godard in top form, playing with the novel in the Nouvelle Vague he helped create, by 1962 in its adolescent phase. The film self-proclaims masterpiece status in a jest of untouchable confidence springing from the well of youthful exploration of a new style of cinema, and five(!) decades later, it's hard to argue how different it is from any film you're likely to see. What separates it from the youtubers and MTVers is discipline to a medium that allows for artistic coherence and an intellectual attention span. Yet for all its cleverness, you question its ability to make any serious statement beyond "bitches be crazy."