A Matrix of Anxieties

One of the best pieces of advice ever given was in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Don't panic! And it’s true, it's never useful to panic. Sure, everything has the potential to induce anxiety: normal social etiquettes, self-doubt, the daily news full of catastrophe and fear-mongering about the economy, war, toxins in our food -- just plain living. And nothing I do seems to affect change. But panic doesn't help. It fogs the brain. Stay calm, breathe deeply. There is hope, although it’s this that makes me even more anxious. Dare I hope, lest I be gravely disappointed once again? The emotional swing of hope and fear duelling daily has made cynics of us all. Nonetheless, one deals however one can: pharmaceutically for the mental-disorder variety of anxiety; meditatively for those inclined to sitting still; cinematically for the rest of us.

Movies have charms to soothe the anxious beast. Escapism: to lose oneself in the pleasures of narrative and forget about the world. Is cinema part of the monster spectacle that connives to keep us apathetic and narcotised (opiated!), or can it also poke, prod, and enrage us into action? Well, there's something for everyone. When it comes to the movies, anxiety as a theme is, like life, sprawling and unwieldy, encompassing everything.

There is, most often in American films it seems, anxiety as a comedic and neurotic state, such as in most Woody Allen films. It’s Allen that first comes to mind for me, as he pretty well defined the sub-genre of movies about Anxious New York Jews, which often overlaps with the sub-genre Anxious New York Writers. Any list of films about anxiety would naturally include writers as subjects, since they seem to be among the most anxious of people, or at least the ones most public about their own phobias, their psyches and their analyses. So, we have the Coen Brothers’ dark comedy Barton Fink, and the Spike Jonze-directed, Charlie Kaufman-penned, brilliantly self-referential Adaptation (not to mention Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York). I could probably think of ten great movies in this genre alone.

But, there are so many other varieties of anxiety! David Cronenberg’s unique brand of horror has an underlying element of anxiety based on fear of the body/technology and the possibility of malfunction. David Lynch explores a similar anxiety, though more existential, surreal, and ominous in nature, especially with Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. And some of the well-defined genres of Asian horror (for instance, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu – don’t even talk to me about inferior Hollywood remakes) excel in exuding a thick atmosphere of anxious and chronic dread. Then there are those films that inspire anxiety because of their realistic docu-drama aesthetic and extremely harrowing plots involving ordinary people. These can be unpleasant to the point of agony to watch, since, unlike horror films, there is not the same distancing effect that allows you to mark them as fiction. I could barely stand watching Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, for instance, which made me question why I was putting myself through torment. Was there a sense of catharsis in suffering so graphically with the characters? Was it simply gratuitous exploitative spectacle disguised as art? I can’t decide. Babel was released in 2006, with a barrage of similarly tense though more fantastical films like Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. The cinematic mood back then looked unbearably bleak. But even in the darkest of times, there is always humour. So who better to conclude the list of anxiety movies with than the Master of Wry Suspense? Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with its emblematic and technically brilliant zoom shot through a staircase, induces a delicious thrilling anxiety that is movie-watching pleasure at its finest. But oops, speaking of Hitchcock! Mel Brook's High Anxiety, an appropriation of over ten Hitchcock flicks including Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds, brings anxiety full circle to outright spoof, satire, slapstick. Laughter, as they say, is the best medicine, so maybe the Americans got it right there. And now, as America is about to swear in a new president, it seems that hope is back, again fighting daily with fear and anxiety. Good luck and Godspeed to each of us.

And so, the final list:
The Matrix Top Ten Anxiety Movies!

Deconstructing Harry (1997) – Woody Allen
Barton Fink (1991) – The Coen Brothers
Adaptation (2002) – Spike Jonze (written by Charlie Kaufman)
Dead Ringers (1988) – David Cronenberg
Lost Highway (1997) – David Lynch
Ringu (1998) – Hideo Nakata
Babel (2006) – Alejandro González Iñárritu
Children of Men (2006) – Alfonso Cuarón
Vertigo (1958) – Alfred Hitchcock
High Anxiety (1978) – Mel Brooks

Matrix #81: Indie Music

What, just ten Best Music Movies?! Why even try? For the sheer fun and ridiculous obnoxiousness of such a task, of course! I’m not talking about musicals here, though Singing in the Rain would certainly be there if I were (perhaps the greatest musical of all time, topped only by The Sound of Music for its kitsch-cult factor). I’m talking about capturing the zeitgeist of when you were young. Is it nostalgia, that somewhat dirty yet deceptively sweet and bitter feeling that brings me back to my idealistic and stupid younger self? Does that give my age away? Yikes! But no, I wasn’t even alive for Beatlemania, too young to remember the beginnings of punk. No matter your age, thanks to these music movies, our collective consciousness remembers.

The Matrix Top Ten Music Movies:

A Hard Day’s Night (1964) – Richard Lester’s groundbreaking Beatles film! Sweeeeeet…

Syd and Nancy (1986) – Alex Cox, who also gave us Repo Man, directs the brilliant Gary Oldman in the morbid punk bio of The Sex Pistols’ Syd Vicious, accused of murdering his girfriend Nancy Spungeon.

Stop Making Sense (1984) –Perhaps the greatest concert film of all time, Jonathan Demme film of The Talking Heads leaves me with two words: Big Suit!

Gimme Shelter (1970) – This is not so much a concert film of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour, as a document of the death of the Sixties at Altamont.

Big Time (1988) – I was eighteen when I saw this and fell in love with Tom Waits forever.

Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) – One of the best biographical music films out there, starring Sissy Spacek in an uncanny performance as Loretta Lynn. And what a life she had!

The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) – Penelope Spheeris, who later gave us Wayne’s World, first made her mark with this excellent documentary on the 1980s LA punk scene.

‘Round Midnight (1986) – Legendary jazz musician Dexter Gordon as the fictional tenor sax player Dale Turner in a film that captures the 1950s New York jazz world.

24 Hour Party People (2002) – I’m a fan of both director Michael Winterbottom and Joy Division (though the movie focuses more on the band’s label), so that’s why this movie makes the list.

This is Spinal Tap (1984) – Rob Reiner’s eminently quotable rock mockumentary that turns it up to 11! Co-writer Christopher Guest would go on to make A Mighty Wind, also worthy of mention, but Spinal Tap defined the genre.

Movie Mythos in Matrix #80 - Gallows Humour

Cracking jokes as the noose tightens? Your ego doesn’t care if you’re about to die. Your ego thinks it’s entertainment. And everything is catering to the ego these days, to some degree or another. The news, politics, sports, gossip – it’s all spectacle. Jokes about any given catastrophe fly around the Internet mere hours after the tragic occurrence, many of them shocking in their flagrant disregard of respect for the dead. But it’s good to have a sense of humour! Whistling past the graveyard, we go to the movies. The best ones combine a dark (yet clear) vision, often a pointed commentary on human foibles and society, and a wicked grin. It’s a thin line, that noose around your neck; it’s a tightrope that can be as difficult to walk as a barbed wire fence. But ah, what flare is achieved by the properly placed last quip, how pleasurable is witticism in the face of death, how delightful it is to laugh with the recognition of truth as the bombs burst around us!

The Matrix Top Ten Gallows Humour Movies!

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) – A Stanley Kubrick masterpiece! Peter Sellers is particularly wonderful as the ex-Nazi Dr. Strangelove, struggling with himself not to Seig Heil the President of the United States, also played by Sellers.

The Trouble with Harry (1955) – Tagline: A comedy about a corpse! This is the most straight-up comedy of Alfred Hitchcock’s, but his films always have elements of macabre humour. He’s even described Psycho as a practical joke.

Fargo (1996) and Blood Simple (1984) – The Coen Brothers seem to take their sadistic pleasure with prolonged scenes of murders gone awry, shovels and woodchippers…

Delicatessan (1991) – Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s gorgeous black comedy with cannibals and slapstick suicide attempts.

Harold & Maude (1971) – 20-year-old Harold is obsessed with death, until he meets and falls in love with 79-year-old Maude. A romantic comedy!

Apartment Zero (1989) – A great thriller with laughs falling into the category of “getting rid of bodies.”

Shallow Grave (1995) – Danny Boyle’s first feature, and more “getting rid of bodies” chuckles.

Stroszek (1977) – Though his films are hardly comic, Wernor Herzog always has a certain dark, ironic outlook on the absurd, and here, it’s a dancing chicken shown right after the final death scene.

Life of Brian (1979) – Okay, not very dark at all, but when crucified criminals start singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” it’s certainly gallows humour at its brightest!

A New Year!

It's Chinese New Year's Eve, and fine time to turn over a new leaf! I've fallen behind on this impossible (for me) task of writing on every movie we see, so instead of trying to battle the rising flood, I'm instead resorting to lists, with occasional commentary. So here is a list of all the movies we've watched since last October, rated completely unobjectively from one to ten.

The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal - 7
The Weather Underground - 8
The Notorious Bettie Page - 7 (Gretchen Mol is great as Bettie Page, even if the film seemed a bit underdeveloped)
Under Fire - 5
Kaspar Hauser - 10 (one of Herzog's best works)
My Best Fiend - 10 (just for the gossip on Kinski)
Wheel of Time - 9
Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004 - 7
Best of Youth - 9
The Machinist - 4 (I was too disturbed by Christian Bale's extreme weightloss for this role, and too concerned for his health to suspend disbelief. Couldn't he have just tried acting?)
The 40 Year Old Virgin - FF (Fast Forward)
White Diamond - 10
Cobra Verde - 9
Spiderman 3 - 4 (It would have been alright until Spidey started in on a dance number)
Chuck and Buck - 8
Atlantic City - 5
A Bizarre Love Triangle - 6
Little Dieter Needs to Fly - 9
Wes Craven's New Nightmare - 4
The Host (Gwoemul) - 9
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster - FF
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (about my 99th viewing) - 10

Happy Year of the Earth Rat!

Matrix #79: The New Underground

Here is my Movie Mythos column from Matrix #79:

Joe and I aren't up on many current films. That is to say, we know what new films are coming up and we read the reviews; we have high or low expectations of them. We don't, however, see very many of them (ah, the sacrifices of parenthood). So it gives us a lot to look forward to when the films come out on DVD. Because this is our dominant mode of movie-watching, and because of our internet movie-rental service, we might end up watching Wernor Herzog one night and Wes Craven the next, as we just did. We are not movie snobs; we like Wernor and Wes both, though you can't compare apples to oranges, as the saying goes. Now, aside from Wernor Herzog, who always astounds in one way or another, when was it that I last thought, wow, that's really good? Sure, there's lots of better-than-mediocre stuff, but I think that Hollywood mainstream is pretty much kaput. As for "independant cinema," well, now it's just Hollywood-lite. It's been clear for quite a while that, for example, the Sundance Festival has become a Hollywood genre unto itself, showing a certain type of small, quiet, well-observed drama, or a quirky kind of darkish comedy that in fact is completely status quo.

Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years – seeing that in writing, I think, am I obsessive-compulsive that I keep lists like this? But no, I decide finally that it's in the interest of a scientific survey. Plus, Joe sometimes forgets if he's seen a movie or not. Ahem… back to it. Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years, I realize that the freshest, most surprising, sink-into kinds of films that I've seen were practically all from Asia, especially South Korea and Thailand. I wonder, is it simply because I'm not used to seeing Asians in North American movies so much, and so I like the reflection of seeing people who look like me, somewhat? I enjoy not having to read subtitles of Cantonese films, but do so anyways for fun. But no, I think it's just because so many of them are darned good. A couple of years ago, one of our national newspapers ran a front page headline that started with a few words of Chinese, then “if you can't read this, you're in trouble.” I was shocked at the overtones: “the Yellow Peril” is coming, folks! But now I realize, it's true. Asian films are superior and they will take over the world.

Here, my list of top ten Asian film rentals (I've tried to stay “underground” and not include the perhaps more well-known directors such as Wong Kar-Wai or Ang Lee, or anything too genre, which warrants a whole other list!):

The Quiet Family; A Tale of Two Sisters by Ji-woon Kim – Perhaps these might be classified as Asian horror, though The Quiet Family is more comedic than horrific.
The Host by Joon-ho Bong (2006) – Okay, as a monster movie and as South Korea's biggest box-office hit of all time, this one is not exactly “underground,” but let's face it, most of the time, “foreign” is “underground.”
Oldboy; J.S.A. (Joint Security Area) by Park Chan-wook – The hyperviolence of Park Chan-wook's films is often way over the top and at times, just too much, but in Oldboy, it works with the intensity of the plot to become a poetic crescendo of psychological gore and mayhem. J.S.A. is an earlier film that explored political tensions on the border of North and South Korea with the same kind of unabashed and soap-operatic style.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring; 3-Iron by Kim Ki-Duk – I can't say I like Kim Ki-Duk's earlier works such as Bad Guy quite as much. They seem to be obsessed with violence and misogyny, albeit in an interesting way, but nevertheless, difficult to watch. But Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… is a pure revelation about a Buddhist Monk and his disciple, and 3-Iron was likewise a lyrical, near-silent Zen-like story about a young man breaking into people's houses and doing their laundry. Extraordinary films.
Saving My Hubby (Be Strong, Geum-sun) by Nam-seob Hyeon – I'm cheating a bit with this one, since it isn't available as a rental yet. I saw it at a film festival a few years ago and have been keeping an eye out for it ever since. Billed as a Korean Run, Lola, Run but way cuter and funnier.
The Eye by Danny and Oxide Pang – Alright, another genre film, but this Thai ghost story about a blind woman receiving a cornea transplant is also Buddhist in nature!
Last Life in the Universe by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang – Another near-silent film about a Japanese man who meets a Thai girl, neither of who speak the other's language. Breath-takingly beautiful (shot by Chris Doyle), meditative yet darkly funny and with a yakuza subplot and a bodycount.