Two Easy Pieces

Every once in awhile, there comes a film that you are willing to change your profile picture for. Well, you--I mean--not me. That's not my style. But my cover photo, totally up for grabs.

 On Tuesday night, I was feeling nostalgic and brooding and thusly in the mood for a Wes Anderson film. I started a download and I googled him to see what he's been up to of late. My efforts, minimal though they were, were rewarded with play times for a movie set in New England, in the year 1965!
Didn't even watch the trailer, I saw the cast list and trusted in his competence. I love the characters he paints, his theater-like sets and the way he  explores a color palet.

His shot composition and sense of depth of field would make Citizen Cain eat his shorts.

His mastery of the long shot and continuous shot have a tangible sense of cinematic history while still creating a world and a style all his own.
Wes doesn't play at subtlety. He keeps to a time period so well that he can actually make a joke out of purposely adding anachronisms.  His worlds are so well established, you can see a commercial and know he made it, the same way you recognize a Tim Burton Set. He wants you to notice who he's recast film after film, he's like Tarantino in this way--but all the characters seem to speak like him, so he's Woody Allen in that way.
The film stock he used for this feature was classic, and the greens and golds he emphasized are going to make you want for a New England Indian Summer--even if you've  never had the pleasure!

"I love you but you have no idea what you're talking about."
I resonate with that moment and many others.
I won't tell you anything else you can't get from the trailer, but if you know Wes Anderson films the protagonists are motivated, intelligent, orderly and serious. Tis the rules, and this dish offers no exception. The female lead made me think too much of Margaret as the young Tenenbaum, and Norton's character seemed written for Schwartzman, yet there was no disputing my satisfaction.
I cried just enough, and laughed just loud enough to overlook the more campy aspects of a film centered around, well, camp.

But it's not the only good film I've seen lately
If you've been talking with my landlady or my shitty upstairs nay-bors, you may have discerned that we've had a few parties recently. And I dare say, we've done a fair bit of singing without you.

As evidenced by these blury photos.

After one such soiree, a few of us who still had limbs and tenable headaches, walked to my second favorite little art theater to watch a Saturday afternoon showing of Howl.
Firstly, I want to say how impressed I was by James Franco's portrayal of Ginsberg. I've listend to more recordings of Allen's voice than is probably normal and was quite captivated by Franco's understanding of the way Ginsberg's rhythm played into how he spoke and breathed.  Oh, and if I've never put this Tom Waits-Allen Ginsberg mashup on a mix for you, I'm sorry.

The other really cool aspect of the film is the way they tie in the trial that Howl endured as being lurid and of no literary value, the personsal biography of Allen in bits and pieces, and a full length, graphically rendered retelling of Howl. I think it's an essential element for any high school English classroom, even if I was a little put off by how they realized the animation. In truth I will email my formal high school English teacher about it, even if the blue yellow tones are over done and the line quality was often reminiscent of microsoft office clipart. I'm sure it would have been way to expensive to shoot live action, atanyrate and I hardly fault them for trying.

I really liked how in many scences they filmed Franco in black and white, to keep us in Ginsberg's time and place. But the color scenes make his character real and approachable for me as well. I think an interesting balance was struck between the two.

During the trial scenes with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, renowned publisher, editor and author of a Coney Island of the Mind, I kept thinking how absurd it was that a poem could actually be put to trial for  being unconstitutional in the United States of America. I realized belatedly that my feelings on the matter of literary value and censorship are (without my knowing) directly linked to this verdict and verdicts of its kind. Of course it's normal that you may not understand everything written in a poem, of course the poet may use metaphors outside the breadth of your experience--that's the freedom-in-the-speech talking. That's the perspective of the words walking right across your eyes and into you mind. Leave the book burning to the Fascists!

If you have a chance to see either of these films I would recommend them with all five stars and both fists. Each film has finer and weaker points and I'd be open to discussing them critically in the comments section with those who have viewed them also. I come to the end of this post thinking that the shape of things is all in how you choose look at them, and the love left spinning around in our world is only as just a little bit bigger than each of us can imagine. But it ain't all smiles and walks in the park, I mean, after all, sometimes endings just end.

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