Joe's One Stop Dream Shop

Dreams That Money Can Buy(1947)

Directed By Hans Ricther

Painter and film theorist Hans Richter and some of his friends in the old time surreal avant-garde gang; Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Max Ernst, decide to get together and direct a surprisingly accessible (for these guys this is "Oceans 11"), film about a man who sets up a business selling dreams to people, who cant have any of their own.

After all, as our narrator Joe informs us, "If you can look inside yourself, other people shouldn't be any problem".

Assorted characters come into the Dream shop, a gangster, a repressed banker, an overzealous pamphleteer, a blind man, a bored housewife, etc, and all are given dreams, each one directed by a different surrealist; Ernst, Duchamp, Ray, etc.

Which alternately, delight, offend, disturb, and annoy there patrons.

In that respect it's a little like an anthology film, with each dream, a story in the story, the best of which is a satire of conventional 1940's relationships, staring two mannequins who fall in love and get married.

It's a surprisingly charming and funny little feminist music video (I want the song from this sequence!).

Though the rest of the music is handled by experimental composer John Cage, who gives the film both a traditional comedic tone and one of ambiguous minimal drones and squeaks.

The narrative of the framing tale, that is the story of Joe, owner and dream weaver of the business, is also distinct in that, none of the characters mouths move, and when dialog does take place on screen it comes as voice over, usually with one characters monologues followed by the others.

Most of these are spoken in a kind of Beat style rhyming (this is also a decade before any of the big Beat writers Keroac, Ginsberg, etc, start publishing.).

Though this rhyming can take a minute to adjust to, it gives the film a much needed sense of rhythm and continuity, as a good framing story should.

If you like early avant-garde films or the artists involved, this is an absolute must see, but if your also just interested in early comic fantasy, stories about dreams, poetry, or just watching something visually different, that doesn't just dismiss narrative as a nuisance, it's worth the price of admission.

Few films see the relationship of dream, cinema, and audience this clearly or eerily, but don't take my word for it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=303G8-8dVWg

They Lost Their Lives In Backyards

Dogtooth(2010)

Directed By Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth is a film about a family who has never let their children of out of the house.

I say “children” but by the time we see them they are well into their 20’s, the eldest perhaps even her early thirties.

So that they do not become confused when reading one of the very limited, and in all probability, heavily redacted books, in their home the parents have taken the time to replace certain unknown words with more tangible ones.

The “sea” they are told is the word for the armchair in the living room, a “zombie” is a small yellow flower, and a “pussy” is a large bright lamp. “For example “If you turn out the ‘pussy’ the room will plunge into darkness”, the mother tells her inquisitive daughter.

I am perhaps giving you too much information up front, the film is largely silent in passages, preferring to tell its story visually and subtly.

It’s not until a substantial way into the film that are we are told what “Dogtooth” means. What we do see and quite early on is that the father brings a blindfolded woman to his home regularly to have sex with the son, who has become increasingly aggressive toward the fence which separates him from the outside world.

Lacking any understanding about why he hates the fence he can only taunt it and hurl objects at it, while suggesting that he can do a better job of cleaning the carpet than it ever could.

A haze of cognitive dissonance pervades everything.

This is all deeply disturbing, and things only get worse as they continue on. Some of you who have seen the 1968 horror film “Spider Baby” also about three adults living and functioning as children and living out a macabre combination of extreme innocence and violence, may experience a sense of deja vu.

“Dogtooth” like “Spider Baby” is also full of pitch black and bleak comedy, but in Dogtooth the comedy is more brutal, surreal, incisive, and believable.

When I first really started this blog a few summers ago, I remember a story that was big on the local news, around the time of the election riots in Iran, about a man in California who had kidnapped a girl, and kept her in his basement for years.

He fathered several children with her, and eventually (with his wife who was aware of all this) moved this second family into the backyard, where they had small shacks concealed from view with a tarp.

There is the Fritzl case, years before that where an Austrian man imprisoned his daughter for 24 years in a basement and abused her, resulting in several children.

I remember then thinking (ignoring for the moment the horrors of the kidnap, perpetual rape, and other likely tortures) about what it would be like to be raised completely cut off from the world. Not just Amish-style culturally cut off, but with no real concept of the outside at all.

The three children of "Dogtooth" having grown up with all things equal begin to become aggressive as the new visitor (the woman brought to have sex with the son) becomes something they cannot share, and begins herself to exert her new found celebrity over other members of the house.

We don’t get any background as to how this family began or why. We can’t understand the parents motives any more than the children could. When silent the family resembles a scene of domestic perfection (the children clad in white), but when the parents speak they sound mysterious and absolute as Gods on a distant mountain.

If you were or have ever met someone who was had a prolonged and sheltered upbringing you might note a familiar childishness in the small gestures of the actors. It’s not just that they are pretending to be children, they are intelligent enough to realize something is wrong with the world, but lack any background knowledge that would tell them what it is.

In a scene which recalls Luis Buneul’s "The Exterminating Angel" (about a party where the guests find themselves unable to leave for reasons that never get explained) the children watch their father leave for work at the edge of the open gate, peering out, but not daring to cross the threshold, like an invisible forcefield had been thrown up at the edge of the driveway. They are told the only possible way to leave the house is in the car. The floor is hot lava.

“Dogtooth” is a satire, of the perfection of the nuclear family, the idea that children can be raised without being contaminated by the rest of the world, but its execution is so ruthless and comical that its easy to forget that its about anything else than a family living in their own private universe. What does freedom mean when the word for freedom might translate to “wood shed”?

From this train of thought, outside of the obvious hypocrisies of the parents and the deeply uncomfortable sexual episodes (akin to the thematically similar “Splice”), we can see a variety of questions emerge about the role language plays in shaping reality (never have Orwell’s notions of a limited language creating limited human beings been better expressed), and the reactionary feelings many people have to modern technology (which revolves for better and worse around communication).

We don’t know exactly why the parents have done this terrible thing to their children but we almost understand their need to create their own perfect world, as instinctively as the son understands that the fence is his natural enemy.

Dogtooth is a very cerebral horror film and if you have dark sense of humor, also an exceptional domestic comedy. It’s rare that I am shocked in a movie, but there were many moments in “Dogtooth” were my jaw was on the floor, or my hands defensively covering my face to keep the images away.

Everyone may see something different in “Dogtooth” “it’s about the homogenizing effects of capitalism”, “the horrors of traditional patriarchy”, “a critique of modern Greek politics”, and they may all be right, when a movie has an ending as devastating and tension filled as the ending here, such considerations take a back seat.

“Dogtooth” takes us into this world of inverted logic, wicked parents, and disastrous siblings rivalries, a place where you might sit on the sea under the gentle light of the pussy with a zombie in your hair and reflect on all that you’ve seen and done and then on the much larger region of all that you don’t know, haven't done, and can only vaguely imagine if at all.

Fight This Generation

The Social Network(2010)

Directed By David Fincher

Overrated. I want you to know that from the bottom of my heart. "The Social Network" is overrated.

It was decent the first time, but the second time revealed its lack of staying power.

Perhaps the pasty nerd has been the standard underdog hero for so long, its feels obscene (or "revolutionary" as the ads say) to show one as unpleasant, insecure, shallow, and manipulative, at least outside of Noah Baumbach films.

Woody Allen and Luke Skywalker did their darnedest to pave the way for Scott Pilgrim (and pretty much every Cera flick) and Eisenberg is perhaps the evil half of the this golden-boy equation, Mega-Scott for the serious set.

The Social Network wreaks of self importance, it's jargon infused montage at the beginning designed to make "Facebook" seem like a visionary miracle, rather than just a drunken rip off of Myspace.

The innovation Facebook made (aside from the streamlined format) was exclusivity, as the site was initially for college students only.

Like an expensive club with a discerning bouncer or an Ivy League school, the line in the sand was class.

Can you afford to be here?

I'm not saying this drove everyone in those early days to come to the site, Myspace was degenerating into a wild west of spam, girls with web-cams and a hunger for credit card information, enough invites from terrible bands to make you swear off music for life, and eye searing gifs and glitter stricken pages that would crash your hard drive sooner than load a complete profile page, but it gave Facebook a safe and clean (white on white layout) feeling as if you were insulated from the commercial un-pleasantries and over-driven idiosyncrasies of a populace still wrestling with the concept of being constantly connected to each other all day everyday.

Even if facebook were not the most popular Internet site in the world (it might change by the time I finish writing these, things move so fast now), it would still be a defining cultural object of the noughties.

Facebook is the Coca-Cola of social networking. Coca-Cola did not invent soft-drinks or carbonated drinks, but they did capitalize on the marketing possibilities in ways no one had then thought possible (and if someone else did who knows where Coke buried them).

David Finchers direction is good (a step up for the God-awful Razzie worthy Benjie Button, though the cinematography there was one of the only watchable things about the film), Sorkinn's dialogue is also good, and the performances are decent, which make "The Social Network" a decent film. If every mainstream movie was this good I would go to the movies more, if this was the best movie of "our generation" or even 2010, I would stop watching movies.

"Facebook" is relevant today, because most of the people I know now use the site, and not just young people but nearly all of my aunts, uncles, and most adults Ive met have one. Even technophobic professors Ive known have started using the site.

It is still too early to tell whether the site will endure as an institution or fade into novelty (the American auto industry used to a be an institution as well) but just because something is popular does not mean it is fit material for cinema. Case in point Mr.Show With Bob And David's "Coupon: The Movie" sketch. Initially I was just going to post the trailer but the court-room drama of it all, for obvious reasons, demands to be scene in its entirety: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPBIDPIo92Q

"Citizen Kane", "Wall Street", and "The Hudsucker Proxy" are gripping films about industrious men, their trails and tribulations, and"The Social Network" would round off this list, but wouldn't trump any of those above it. Then again none of them were snorting lines of coke off the breasts of 20 year old college girls, so I can why these films might seem quaint by modern standards.

The issue of intellectual copyright is an important one, though it seems a little redundant today, when most people download any media they want with ease. Inventors stealing each others work is nothing new historically, and 2010 also saw Iron Man 2 which pitted Tony Stark against a Russian Nemesis the Crimson Dynamo (at the time of the comics the Russian cold war foil, in modern terms the Russian plague of black market knock-off American tech products, especially online). Tony Stark like Mark Zuckerburg is also a clever egoist who creates a suit of armor around himself to cover a wound. For Stark the wound is physical shrapnel just an inch away from his heart, for Zuckerberg it's also a matter of the heart but in a literal sense, it's wounded pride.

When Zuckerberg gets shot down in the cafeteria, after the best lines of dialogue about the social networking phenomena are uttered "does everyone really need to hear every thought that passes through your head?", he immediately walks back to his business partner and says "we must expand!". Zuckerbergs shell is arrogance, and so is Starks, they are two tin men singing "If I only had a heart", in different pitches. I prefer the Iron Man treatment which understands that its squabbles over who built what first, who inspired who, and wear those lines end, are not Greek tragedy, just lucky nerds spazzing out over their need to be the center of attention. "Exit Through The Gift Shop" knows this too.

Zuckerberg's armor is asshole cool ("you just want everybody to think you are") which he emulates from the appropriately played Justin Timberlake, his own private Tyler Durden.

Timberlake's best role so far was in "Southland Tales" dancing to The Killers in a beer commercial pop-art hallucination sequence that visually told the story of the noughties, more succinctly than any film Ive seen since, but here he's equally effective, climaxing in his office emasculation (perhaps the greatest fear of the white collar worker after the spectre of unemployment), and the closest the film gets to real drama.

And speaking of real drama, the character in this film is not the Mark Zuckerberg and it's really surprising to read reviews that use a fictional character as a basis for commenting on a real person. You are not your profile page, and fictional people no matter how "based on true events" are still fictional people, so let's refrain from speculating about how the film convinced him to become a philanthropist.

Knowing information about someone (even intimate information) and actually knowing them are two different things, and though I am adamantly against the prevailing technophobia and it's many guises, this differentiation is something that does seem to be seriously eroding.

Which corner of media is most responsible I can't say (if its exclusively a media related issue at all), and though it would be easy and convenient (especially to my purposes in this review) to just say "Internet" or "social networking" are the culprits (grab your pitchforks and meet me in the town square), the problem is more complex than that, and more than a review of a David Fincher movie warrants. Meet me in the comments section below if you wish to argue, discuss this or any point further.

"The Social Network" is a decent film, a historical artifact that get's some of the zeitgeist of Internet life, the inadequacies, social anxiety, the fear of talking to people directly (be it through lawyers or any other third body) but passes up the opportunity to plumb these depths and their impact, instead focusing on a typical "the rise and the fall" of celebrity plot (a tired theme at this end point of the decade especially after seeing Sophia Coppola's "Somewhere" a truly cinematic treatment of the subject).

David Fincher has not made any true vibrant work to me since the much critically maligned "Fight Club" (the film its cool to hate, cus "everyone likes it") and though he makes the best of this material with a winning icy score, some compelling performance, well though out mis-en-scene, and crisp editing, but at its heart its all hollow.

I guess that's part of the point, the hollowness of it all. But if all there is to say about the social networking experience is that it's a hollow thing, built by hollow people, because machines and money are bad and that beloved catch-phrase "alienating", than it hasnt given us any new or "generation defining" information worth entertaining, even if its delivery on some levels is. Watch if you want, praise if the spirits move you, but try to remember there is or at least once was, a world outside of backstabbing, famous people, and computers. Now if you will excuse me, I'm off to post a link to this page on Facebook.