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Old 08-28-2005, 10:34 PM   #183
Terabin
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Location: Twin Cities, MN
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I was staying in a Lincoln Park hotel in Chicago for the past week while my parents did orientation stuff with my sister who is a first year at DePaul. At any rate, there was a nice theater around the corner showing indie films and I saw a couple of them.

"Last Days" and "Grizzly Man".

I found Gus Van Sant's "Last Days" extremely poetic. I love it that Van Sant has felt like he can break out of Hollywood convention for his trilogy beginning with "Elephant" and "Gerry," which seems to meditate on needless death. I love the moments of silence in "Last Days," which draw the audience further into the film if the audience is ready for it. It's amazing that the same director did "Good Will Hunting," another good film IMO, but a crowd-pleaser rather than an auteristic statement. In both "Last Days" and "Grizzly Man," the audience knows the ending of the story, and so the point is not so much a narrative A to B, but a poetic presentation of the question, "Why did this happen?" Even though I had read reviews of both "Last Days" and "Grizzly Man" previous to the films, which sometimes turns me off to seeing the films, especially in a theater, I was entranced by the craftsmanship of Van Sant and Werner Herzog, who directed "Grizzly Man". For those who don't know, "Last Days" is an account of a Kurt-Cobain-esque character's last hours before death. "Grizzly Man" is a documentary comprising footage shot by Timothy Treadwell, a self-proclaimed protector of the Alaskan grizzly bear, who was ironically killed in his thirteenth summer of work by a grizzly bear he was not familiar with. The thing I found most interesting about "Grizzly Man" was the intersection between Herzog's negative, brutal view of nature and Treadwell's idealistic, perhaps naive love of the animals. Herzog's love for the egomaniac leads him to present Treadwell in that light, and Herzog, quite the egomaniac himself, is very PRESENT in the documentary as he narrates in an acknowledged subjective manner, offering his judgment on Treadwell. I haven't seen any of Herzog's other documentaries, but I wonder how visible he makes himself. It seems to me to run against the grain of most documentaries, whose directors hide under the guise of objectivity.

The best film I've seen this summer is "Broken Flowers" by Jim Jarmusch. I loved his "Stranger Than Paradise," a quirky black-and-white masterpiece made back in 1984 which considers the lives of a few young, Hungarian immigrants. Jim Jarmusch creates his own cinematic space. You know you're watching a Jarmusch movie when one is on. Despite the heavy starpower of "Broken Flowers," IE Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton, etc., Jarmusch is in full control of the reins. With his episodic take on the life of a washed-up Don Juan, worldly hipster soundtrack to boot, the viewer is brought into the melancholy, dead-pan world of Jarmusch. And it is a beautiful place. The scene with the pearls has an emotional weight I cannot really express.

I finally caved in a bought "The Last Picture Show," after waiting to see if I could find it somewhere, anywhere, for less than 15 dollars. See that film too if you haven't. It's a classic take on small-town adolescence.
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