Thoughts on BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

Who is Benh Zeitlin? How is this his first feature film? How on earth did the movie happen?

I don't understand this.

Benh Zeitlin is the co-writer, director, AND co-composer (my favorite score of the year so far) of BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, a first for the guy which doesn't make any sense when you watch the film. It feels so assured in its style, its tone, its look, its treatments of its main characters, almost everything feels contradictory to the fact that it is a first film.

Which makes me so envious. (I watched an interview online and he looks like he is 22 years old. I felt so bad about myself and my ambitions. But it turns out he's about to be 30. So I feel a little better. Just a little.)

It is weird how certain ambitious films work for and me and others don't. Terrance Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE is a mess, yet a beautiful one, and the almost as equally ambitious PROMETHEUS falls flat on its face for me. BEASTS is one of those where I can get past the messiness and find the greatness. So, very much like a first film, it isn't perfect. However, what ultimately is presented to us is a colorfully ambitious film that isn't afraid to go big and take chances.

The story is this: Hushpuppy (played by non actor Quvenzhané Wallis, who is used extremely well) lives with her daddy in an isolated island off the coast of Louisiana and must come to terms with an oncoming threat of her town being destroyed by a storm and her father's fatal heart condition. 


Oh, also there are magical beasts called Aurochs. 

The world presented here is filled with garbage, wet and grimy, sticky and muddy. The Bathtub, the isolated village the film lives in, is dirty. but next to the grime is a magical quality that I can't pinpoint exactly how it is achieved. A film professor told me once that the audience always wants their trash to be aesthetically pleasing. Beautiful garbage he says. And this is what BEASTS looks like.

In fact most of the film works by having two unlike things together on screen.

Almost every scene has two opposing concepts conflicting with each other. Beauty and disgust. Joy and sadness. Physically impoverished and emotionally rich. Life and death. The film walks the line between each conflicting themes pretty effortlessly. Something is in conflict with its opposition in every shot of the film.

BEATS also creates an individual conflict for the audience. The film is told with a 6 year old's perspective of the world which is really the main reason why this movie works for me. We see through her eyes extreme poverty, apocalyptic natural disasters, whore houses, and death.

These moments do two things: they bring us back to the feelings we had as a child dealing with the darkness of the world, and the naivety we had when dealing with them. But our own experiences and knowledge continually undercuts this with a tinge of sadness. Its a conundrum really. Feeling a child's naivety while keeping our adult cynicism in the backseat feels really odd and strange, but also new and exciting. I would really compare this film to Spike Jonze's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. Both films deal with a child-like perspective on the world, yet they allow us to think of our own childhood memories which will ultimately always lead us to compare our thought process then and how we think now.

The unbalanced feeling I had while watching BEASTS really did excite me.

At the heart of the film is what Hushpuppy ultimately does. It is what we all do in our lives without realizing it and that is creating our own narrative about our lives. Quite a few times she says that "In a million years, when kids go to school they gonna know, once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." She matters, everyone will know who she is, her actions affect the entire world. Which is so heartfelt and sad. We know very few care for this girl, who lives off the land in shanty houses separated from the rest of us. But it is hard to want to contradict her. I think this is what we all want to believe. That we have made a large impact on the world. What the film does is give that to her.

This film has gained some criticism for being exploitative and promoting anti-government agendas and isolationism. That the narrative is bunk and its depictions of its characters as unflattering. I don't quite get why some people are delving into the politics of this film. It is definitely an emotional ride rather than claiming a political statement. It has these elements, yes, but they are never dwelled upon and are pushed aside for the emotional story of Hushpuppy. It is a much more visceral film than what these critics are saying.
A good article about the polarizing effect this film has can be read over at IndieWire.

This is one of the bests movies of the year and I highly recommend seeking it out. Seriously, the audience I saw it with applauded and didn't move from their seats until the credits had ended, which is a rarity for a non-superhero film. Go for the amazing performance Wallis gives. Or go for the incredible visuals. Just go see it. In a summer of emotionally empty summer films (I'm looking at you Dark Knight Rises) BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is much needed. It really will affect you in some way or another.

Mitchum In Paris

Yeah...

I think I was in a loopy mood one night when I made this video. I had watched three 40s-50s films back to back to back and whenever I do that I start to get in a trance. It isn't necessarily feeling like I've jumped into a time machine and back to when these films were made. I just can't shake off this dreamlike quality. 

So I finished with OUT OF THE PAST, a classic Hollywood noir starring Robert Mitchum. And in this dream like state I thought, "Man, Robert Mitchum. he balls so hard." because I had listened to Watch the Throne's "Niggas in Paris" on loop at work. So in my dreamlike state I thought it would be a good idea to mesh the two. I don't think this video balls as hard as Mitchum does, but I'll leave it up to you to make up your own decision about that.*

*If you don't choose Mitchum, then we cannot be friends. Look at him. How is Humphrey Bogart more famous than this guy? Bogart has a nasty grill. It's like the inside of a fig newton bar has been caked in the gaps between his teeth.

Wong Kar Wai's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE set to "In Ear Park"

Here's my history with this beautiful, vibrant, subdued, and quiet film that is deceptively small but large in magnitude. I blind-bought it (I did a lot of blind buying Criterion films last year) and watched it one night. My thoughts about it were pleasant and overall positive. I went to work right after.

The next day I woke up and surprisingly the movie was on my mind. After a few minutes of this, I decided to put the DVD back in and re-watch it. This time I really enjoyed it. There were moments from the first viewing that I didn't catch, didn't quite understand. And this second viewing was the key to unlocking certain mysteries.

But I didn't stop there. I drove back to my home town that day. It was late. Probably two or three in the morning and I wasn't ready to go to bed. I brought IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE with me on a hunch. The cover was tempting me. I put it in again and watched the film for a third time in two days. The subtleties, the mysterious, the scope of it kept increasing.

I've probably seen the film around 10 times now in the span of a year and I am still in love with it. It has led me to watch many of Wong Kar Wai's other great films. Even 2046, the companion piece to IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Kar Wai calls it an echo, but it is totally a sequel), which I was reluctant towards, was exceptional. But nothing has quite topped this film. I don't think many will for me.

I said all of that to present a video I made. A music video if you will. I have recently fallen in love with the editing process and wanted to edit this movie into something. Here it is.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

   Miranda July’s debut Me and You and Everyone We Know is a very cute and quirky and overall important movie to me. It brings up the issue of human connection during a digital age. And anybody who knows me will know that if there is a movie about human connection, I’ll most likely poop back and forth with it. Forever. (Instead of asking how one could do that and more importantly WHY anyone would want to do that, it would be better if you just watched the movie). 

Christine, July’s character, is working on an art project where she sets a camera on still photos of two or more people and plays out conversations with them, giving them a dialogue, a story, anything to give the still photo more life. Many of the characters in the movie are, in a way, these still photos. They live together, work together, eat together, but don’t communicate very well with each other. One subplot is entirely through a web chat where the line between innocent and perverted is hard to see. (pooping back and forth. Forever. POOPING BACK AND FORTH. FOREVER) Christine with her art project in hand, stands face to face with the person who receives art project submissions and is told to mail it in to avoid it getting lost. 

Why I find the movie so moving and important to me is because I DO those things. Someone calls me and I let it go to voice mail, wait a few minutes, and TEXT them back. It doesn’t matter who it is. I just don’t like talking on the phone. Why is that? I’ve asked myself this question a few times before, but I really tried to answer it after watching this movie. Was I scared of bad conversation? No. Do I not like talking to the caller? Not usually. Then what was it? Laziness. Pure, fat –ass –waking – up – at – 3:30 – pm laziness. (This whole “not taking any classes” thing is ruining any chance of a good sleep schedule. A social life at that) 

There are just as many instances of skewed communication as there are people trying to make some. Richard, a divorced father of two played by John Hawkes, literally sets his own hand on fire in order for his kids to just TALK with him.  I might be that type of person who has to have a family member burn something of themselves in order to become aware of them. I don’t want to be that type of person. 

 So this movie actually makes me want to answer phone calls, eat lunch with people, actually TALK and express EMOTIONS with them. And poop back and forth with them. Forever.