I see a lot of movies every year. A
ton. But this year I’ve decided I don’t see enough movies, so one of my
New Year Resolutions was to simply see more. And to write about them.
See, that’s the other half of the equation: I see a ton of movies, but
I write about comparatively few of them. There are a lot of reasons,
but they mainly boil down to the fact that I feel the need to do long
form reviews, and sometimes – like in the midst of Sundance – I just
don’t have the time.
And
so was born this new blog! I aim to make an entry for every single
movie I see in 2010. Some entries may be very short, some may be
lengthy. Entries may take a couple of days to be posted. Let’s see how
long this lasts.
One
last thing: one of my main objectives this year is to rewatch more
movies. I know this sounds like a strange goal, but there are films I
haven’t seen since high school, which means it’s been almost a lifetime
since I saw them. Recently I rewatched Black Christmas for the first
time since the 1980s, and I might as well have been seeing the movie
for the first time. I’m interested in getting a look at some movies I
loved or hated twenty or even ten years ago and seeing how I feel about
them now.
Let’s begin…
#21 Enter the Void
2009
d. Gaspar Noe
Sundance Quickie #2
Okay, I lied. I was going to do a video blog of this, but then I had to catch a bus and now I’m at the busy press center (free wifi!) and I think talking into my phone is more than I feel comfortable doing in a room full of strangers. So you’ll have to deal with my typed thoughts on this one.
WOW. Love it or hate it, Noe’s Enter the Void is an incredible feat of cinema. It’s a movie that I don’t know that I can watch as a whole again, but I could sit through almost any segment for the brilliance on display. Walking out I was amazed that I could hate all the actors and all the characters but still love the movie.
A two and a half hour adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the movie follows Oscar, a bland shitty American drug dealer in Tokyo, up to his death and far, far beyond. It’s often mind-boggling and poetic and beautiful and ugly and sick and weird and fucked up. It’s a psycho-sexual disaster area for sure. It’s also probably a masterpiece. Just stunning, if hard to endure.