Bellflower

(Bellflower/Oscilloscope, 2011)

           

          Leave it to young men between twenty and thirty years old to think the name “Lord Humongous” might have significance beyond being an inside joke.  That is essentially the premise put forth by Bellflower, a loud and clangy first film from writer-director-actor Evan Glodell. “Lord Humongous cannot be defied” are the first words we see onscreen, after the title and a sequence showing scenes from the film in backwards fast-motion. The quote is attributed to Lord Humongous himself. Anybody can get the joke. But the problem remains that Mr. Glodell has made a film that is, basically, entirely self-attributed.

            Glodell plays Woodrow, who lives with his best friend Aiden (Tyler Dawson), in a deadbeat California suburb. Their passions are almost as affected as their names; in anticipation of the coming apocalypse, both young men build flame-throwers, guns, and cars that will allow them to run triumphant after the world ends. Their lives are debased in a pattern reminiscent of Harmony Korine’s work, though with a less obtuse sense of humor. They drink, smoke pot, walk around shirtless and call one another “dude” often enough to create a new idiom. But once they meet two girls, Milly (Jessie Wiseman) and Courtney (Rebekah Brandes) at a local bar, Woodrow falls fast in love (with Milly) and their lives and routines of building cool stuff get somewhat sidetracked. It gets even more sidetracked after Woodrow storms out on an unfaithful Milly, rides his motorcycle down the street, and gets rammed by a car. But then, it the grand tradition of movie characters who have come near death or suffered a serious injury and gone back to their lives, Glodell finds it useful to make the narrative a little weirder. And very bloody.

(Bellflower/Oscilloscope, 2011)

            The film starts off with the interesting dichotomy of when boys-play—the flamethrowers, cars and dudes—becomes something corrosive and disturbing. But Glodell only skims this point, instead zoning in on the most obvious metaphor possible; that Woodrow and Aiden’s visions of the apocalypse is mirrored in the turbulence of falling in love and trying to hold on to friendship. He then shakes it up with some of the mind-trip, reality-or-fantasy shenanigans that have made other recent films, such as Inception and Black Swan, so successful, while the manipulative tendencies that come as baggage with this type of narrative are never toned down.

            For these reasons, nothing in Bellflower feels sincere. The mechanics on display in the film, including all the gadgets Woodrow and Aiden build, look impressive, but do not feel sincere. It does not feel sincere when we see close-ups of the street sign reading “Bellflower Ave.” It does not feel sincere when we see a freeze frame of Woodrow being punched in the face by a mean Texan with the nerve to insult his girlfriend. It does not feel sincere when we see blood running down Woodrow’s shirt as he walks away from his girlfriend’s house. On the level of acting, the only performer with real conviction is Rebekah Brandes, who gives Courtney, caught in the middle of a bad situation, a sense of mystery and spunk that is not communicated through overblown gestures and mimicry. But even she gets stuck with possibly the most insincere scene in the film, when she screams at her roommate—whom we have never met or heard of—to move, before slapping her to the ground. All the violence in the film feels like something out of an arty comic book rather than its intended effect: fragments from a brain damaged fantasy.

            Yet apparently, none of this will matter in the visual climate we live in. The film is not so much nihilistic as fashionably cynical. It feels produced by people who don’t see any point in growing up, but do see a point in being hip to and mocking of that same worldview. In its irony, its cynicism, its whoa-what-are-we-watching formula, this is a film that will be granted a large audience. But it will be one that won’t be able to admit that there is only a certain point you can bring self-reflexive cynicism to before it becomes something genuinely functionless, representative of genuinely nothing. Nothing other than the fact that this current generation of young people is not humongous; it is the most mediocre generation in human history.

Hiatus

Collectors is now officially on a much needed hiatus. Damon and Paul need some rest. They are over-scheduled and uncertain about their immediate futures.
This hiatus should last until the end of July, when we will resume as normal--and with a long-ish essay from Damon. Questions, comments, or concerns until that point may be e-mailed to Damon at damongriffin47@gmail.com.
This is all.

Troll Hunter

(Troll Hunter/2011)

          

          The fact is: Norway has one of the highest percentages of atheists in the world. Around 70% of the country’s population are estimated to be nonbelievers. This is relevant not simply as a curiosity, or as a sign of how far godless certain western nations have become, but also because of the absurd, prank-hilarity goofball Norweigen movie Troll Hunter. The film has not received much in the way of distribution so far, and that’s a pity. But it also may be because—well, no more should be said. According the film, we aren’t supposed to know about any of this.

            Troll Hunter starts with a shaky camera in an awkward position in a car, showing somebody’s arm. This is a documentary being shot by three students from Volda College (a real college) as they navigate their way through upper Norway, tracking a mysterious, illegal bear hunter. The hunter, Hans (Otto Jespersen) drives around in a banged up camper, staying in anonymous campgrounds each night. After several encounters where he brushes off his trackers, they finally follow him deep in to the woods and realize that the man believes he is hunting trolls. He agrees to let them film him, and on their next nighttime excursion, they realize that he really is hunting trolls, whose existence been covered up by the Norwiegen government for years. Trolls, while they may be dumb giants, can smell the blood of a Christian and will not hesitate to kill one. All three students claim to be non-believers. Hans has the aura of someone so thoroughly beyond belief that a church would distintegrate within ten feet of him. But still, the Trolls must be kept “in their territory.” Because recently they have been breaking out in to more civilized areas. 

            For the following hour and a half, Troll Hunter is a monster movie. Except not quite. It is also a very silly deadpan comedy, a grand allusion to Norse mythology, and a satire of government bureaucracy and the ways cultures dismiss their history, stories and their sense of fun. It is this last bit that is most decisive to Troll Hunter, because the film chooses to be fun and un-bureaucratic. Stylistically, the film may take its cues from other recent genre-mockumentaries such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. It suffers from the same inherent flaw as these other films; that is, a non-professionalism that too easily veers from cleverness to laziness. However, where those films took themselves and the most evident tropes of horror and action movies deadly seriously, with no sense of sarcasm Troll Hunter is a sort of Gulliver’s Travels of digital age B-movies. It aims for laughs only after a whole chunk of scenes come in to perspective, not with moment-to-moment jokes. And if we don’t have to believe its pretentions—towards Scandinavian history, culture, and government—have any significance on the story, then we can still see director Andre Ovredal’s style, as jagged-edged as it is, as a sometimes sweeping form of scene craft. The first true troll encounter, where the filmmakers and Hans are being chased by a gigantic, three-headed “Tosserlad,” is seen mostly from the cameraman’s own point of view, as he alternates (first intentionally, then by chance) between night vision and regular camcorder vision. The cameraman is the most frantic of the students, though at first we don’t know why. To make matters worse, he is the one who is lost. Ovredal is smart enough to realize that with the formula he has chosen, the camera can in fact represent several subjective viewpoints, and the real-time shooting technique can provide its own ironies. He is the first filmmaker working in the mock-verite style to turn the camera operator—the guy who has our vision in his hands—in to an unreliable narrator.

            Troll Hunter is sequenced between two titles: the first claiming that, after the footage we are about to watch turned up at a television studio anonymously, a team of investigators spent a year trying to determine if it was fake or authentic, and determined it was authentic. It is a given that, of course, the footage we are watching is not at all authentic. As realistically stern as actor Jespersen remains throughout each escapade, he is in fact a famous stand-up comedian in Norway; perhaps this is his way of trying out a prolonged practical joke. But how authentic Troll Hunter is as cinema is still unknown. It may be thrilling, weird, informative and never boring, but it is a firm product of the age of kids dicking around and thinking it looks cool. (The students in this film never stop grinning to themselves). Whether Troll Hunter wants to be merely hip or a more elaborate stunt is not clear, nor is it in any other recent genre-mockumentary. This means that it’s high time we see one of these films with only professional actors, or with no appeal to teenage enthusiasms whatsoever. Let’s say, a courtroom drama mockumentary. Will that be too boring? Filmmakers need to take that risk. You can’t create cinema if you don’t first risk tedium.

Road to Nowhere

(Road to Nowhere/Montery Media, Inc, 2010)

         

        As its title may suggest, Road to Nowhere is a bit of stilted, if admirable, poetry. Its opening scene says nothing more than "Get this"; a girl sits down in a drab neon room and injects a disk with the title “Road to Nowhere” scrawled on it into her laptop. We zoom in on the screen, showing a girl lying on a bed at night, drying her hair with a blow dryer. For the next few minutes, which include credits and a song, we are in the film “Road to Nowhere” directed by Mitchell Haven. Then we get back outside that movie. Haven (Tygh Runyan) is being interviewed from prison by a reporter who wants to know all about how and why he came around to making a film based on a real-life murder in North Carolina. In flashbacks, with inserted scenes from his film, Haven casts a mysterious, pretty girl named Laurel (Shannyn Sossamon) who insists that she’s not really an actress, though she looks exactly like the woman Velma, the real-life culprit in the murder. But it appears, based on Laurel's secret conversations with another actor that she may in fact have something to hide.

            Bodies disappear. State funds disappear. Haven becomes infatuated with Laurel, even as his creative consultant (Waylon Payne) and a pesky blogger (Dominique Swain) are on his and Laurel’s tails. Yet what never even makes an appearance is internal logic. Haven and his actress fall in love. Fine, but why, aside from her being physically gorgeous? Why does their relationship remain in blissful stasis until the very end? The recognition, by those working with Haven on his film, that this is a dangerous relationship is the most interesting point of conflict in the film, but it brings up even more illogicalities. Why stage a crucial scene near the dark entrance to a tunnel, and then back away from the scene before it can be played out? And if about half of what we’re seeing is, in fact, staged footage, how did it even get to the point of being assembled, given what transpires?

(Road to Nowhere/Montery Media, Inc 2010)

            It is these questions that stay on our minds more than director Monte Hellman’s wishful pandering to the what-is real-and-what-is-not-ideal that has blown up so much of recent cinema. The 78-year old Hellman has completed his first feature with this film since 1989, and he seems desperately eager to catch up on things. Twitter, Facebook, DSLR cameras and talk shows figure prominently in this film, and it looks like Hellman has been watching Michael Haneke and Christopher Nolan’s films to get a sense of what’s arty these days. But Road to Nowhere, despite beautiful photography by Joseph M Civit, never manages to transcend anything beyond the above summary. We can be grateful that the wonderful actress Shannyn Sossamon carries so many of the scenes with pure charm, and that we are as in love with her as Mitchell Haven is. For example, one small early scene that shows her putting on her socks is a lovely, seductive bit of acting. But we’re also as in love with her as Hellman, and in the way he frequently shoots her half-clothed or implicitly naked, we feel like we are indulging in someone else’s fantasy (a concept mentioned several times in the film). The film never escapes the impression of being by and for out of touch, dirty old men.

            But Hellman’s main subject is that which is as obvious as air: filmmaking. He rightly wants to get us thinking about what a filmmaker does to their collaborators through their visions, and what harm they cause themselves through obsession. But look: a good book about writing should make writing look vigorous, alive, and sensible. Hellman’s film about filmmaking makes the whole craft look obnoxious. He wants us to take a man who insists that it matters when a bottle is full of tequila instead of rum as a sympathetic director-figure. He wants us to believe that merely looking at scenes from films like The Seventh Seal on a T.V screen will remind us of what good filmmakers aspire towards. He thinks that a director’s “vision” is something so sacrosanct that it is perfectly natural to accept no compromises and to act like a general pain in the ass. All of which can be seen in the figure of Mitchell Haven. Some people might go in to Road to Nowhere thinking it will delve in to the strange logic of a filmmaker’s personal life and their films, like what Fellini did in 8 ½ . Instead, they’ll get an old director showing them that a filmmaker should be bearded and stubborn; well, plenty of them are.