Current music: The Jesus Lizard - "Mouth Breather"
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No one asked, but -
1 - Lilya 4-Ever - (d. Lukas Moodysson)
2 - Bus 174 - (d. Jose Padilha)
3 - LOTR: The Return of the King - (d. Peter Jackson)
4 - Fog of War - (d. Errol Morris)
5 - The Son - (d. Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardennes)
6 - Raising Victor Vargas - (d. Peter Sollett)
7 - In This World - (d. Michael Winterbottom)
8 - Bubba Ho-Tep - (d. Don Coscarelli)
9 - City of God - (d. Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund)
10 - El Bonaerense - (d. Pablo Trapero)
Honorable Mentions -
Power Trip - (d. Paul Devlin)
[first 60 min. of] Elephant - (d. Gus Van Sant)
I Wish I'd Seen -
Japón - (d. Carlos Reygadas)
In My Skin - (d. Marina de Van)
Bad Santa - (d. Terry Zwigoff)
Best Re-releases -
The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 - (1974, d. Joseph Sargent)
Eyes Without a Face - (1960, d. Georges Franju)
It was still a shitty year for movies.
THE DARIEN GAP (1996) - d. Brad Anderson
I don't like this movie.
It was on IFC the other afternoon, and I figured that since it's not on video or DVD that I should go for it. Perfect example of a first-time filmmaker not in control of the medium.
I go back and forth about Brad Anderson, but most of the time I root for him just because he's from Connecticut. He's got some talent, but he's never hit one out of the park, and you have to start wondering if he will. 'The Darien Gap' is his first feature, which sort of surprised me since 'Next Stop Wonderland' - a much better movie - still feels so much like a 'first movie.'
Since no one else is ever going to see it, the story's about a guy named Lyn Vaus (played by a guy named Lyn Vaus) who lives in Boston and is homeless and a deadbeat and has a video camera. He's using it to make a film where he interviews his friends about being disaffected and in their twenties. There's a lot of talk about hitchhiking to Patagonia and an unbelievably retarded double-red herring involving giant sloths and swampland. It's all very Gen-X Slacker zeitgeist. He meets a girl who designs really ugly hats and they fall in love. He's such a self-defeating loser, though, that he can't keep it together and his girl falls out of love with him again and again. But the real pickle in the cheeseburger is that he can't seem to get over the divorce of his parents and his messed up feelings about his dad. Feelings which the director pokes at constantly and then never bothers to resolve.
The zooms suck, the navel-gazing sucks, the self-reflective documentary aesthetic in a film about a documentarian sucks, the framing device sucks. But, out of all the suckage, that which sucks most is the voiceover, which, on more than one occasion actually made me think that the only part of the Gen-X slacker zeitgeist that I wanted in on was that whole suicide thing.
I can say two nice things about the movie: The best thing that happens is he steals a white stretch limo. That was fun. Like, the first moment when he steals it. Then it gets boring again. The second best thing is that Lynn Vaus (the actor) is a total shlub. I can't think of too many films where the leading man is so completely average-looking. Then again, Vaus also has a screenplay credit, so he's partly to blame for what's happened here.
Ultimately, the film doesn't capture the aforementioned Gen-X slacker zeitgeist that it wants to deny and embrace at the same time (how very fucking Gen-X slacker zeitgeist) and manages to confirm that the guy who made it is still too self-indulgent to be making a movie.
There's a reason it's not on video.
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