The saddest music in the world... no really...

It seems that all I ever do is rave about the movies I watch, and at times I wonder if maybe it is just my terrible lack of discerning criteria that leads me to appreciate just about anything for the sheer magnitude of taking an idea and making it a reality. But then perhaps I am just more discerning upon initial selection of said films… Ah yes, one more mystery to be solved… or not.

Now this isn't totally true, and in fact I will mention in passing two movies (those of you _really_ enlightened people will think me tremendously shallow, so be it.) "Japón" - by Carlos Reygadas... This was a Conaculta sponsored production and all, but after the first oppressive hour of slowly panning horizon shots and barely grunting dialogue, I could take no more. The filming was beautiful, in the way that looking extensively at vacation pictures from someone else's vacation can be... and with little to no commentary to liven the shots and make them vivid beyond their sheer visual imposition. Now, from what I understand, I missed the bizarre taboo-shattering octogenarian widow vs. despondent forty-something artist sex scene, but even that was followed by another half hour of perfectly avoidable landscape before the ultimately tragic demise of the "wrong" character. I can't say more because I didn't actually see it, but that is just it. I could not FORCE myself to sit through the whole film. This has only happened once before, and incidentally the filmmaker of that other film was cited as an inspiration for Reygadas... of course, I knew this long before the special features confirmed this... I knew it because my physical attention (not just mental) was exactly the same... The Iranian film by director Abbas Kiarostami "The Wind Will Carry Us" made another gorgeously filmed and horrifyingly, unwatchably slow commentary on the disconnect between modern society and pre-modern villages that still exist in remote corners of the earth. I am, perhaps, a failure in the art-film viewing world, but I just couldn't take it either.

That said... go ahead... pass your judgments...

Now… Jeff, you will appreciate this perhaps, as I always laugh at the inappropriate moments (remember Brazil?), my sense of the absurd just a little too wild for the conventional audience, offensive, I am sure, to the sensibilities of the delicate egos of burgeoning directors and veterans alike.

BUT…

I haven't laughed so hard or enjoyed a movie quite so much as this very bizarre pastiche flick by Canadian Guy Maddin, (notably and unmistakably produced by Atom Egoyan) "The Saddest Music in the World". Based on the screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, this is at the pinnacle of postmodern pastiche - think Hartley's "Amateur" meets Cronenberg's "Crash" meets von Triers "Dancer in the Dark" meets the Coen brothers' "The Man That Wasn't There" or even "Barton Fink". The sense of sadness and desperation that usually accompanies films set in the 1930's was instead replaced by a theater of the absurd and an amateur ethnomusicologist's dream in a soundtrack... There is a sly yet open critique of all that Broadway - read: Hollywood cum US government is in the world, a heartless money-making remorseless self-indulgent fop, one that ultimately goes up in flames when it destroys everything around itself, (himself). I loved Rosselini as a mastermind cripple and Maria de Madeiros as an amnesiac nymphomaniac... although her version of nymphomania was decidedly tame, but metaphorical for the escapism that current mass-produced media endeavors to present to the brain-washed majority. Sex is purely a physical act of which she partakes as a way to not deal with what she must feel and come to terms with. Meanwhile the hilarious interplay between brothers and a father as sexual rivals is in fact a deeper critique of the disintegration of families that is perhaps more apparent in times of war (read: now) and was primordially sparked precisely by the beginning of the cycle of great wars, when mass international migration began.

Also, the three film shorts were equally amusing and unexpected, my favorite being the "Sissy Boy Slap Party"... Yes, Maddin is certainly a strange duck (I think I could fall in love with a mind like that), but then don't all interesting people have something of a neurotic personality? Ruben Darío (sorry, I can't get rid of him) makes a great case for this in his story "El pájaro azul" which treats the bohemian life and ultimate suicide of a poet par excellence... quoting Garcín "Creo que siempre es preferible la neurosis a la estupidez." And I couldn't agree more.