In 2015, Look Who's Back, a feature film by German director David Wnendt based on a satirical novel of the same title, took Germany by storm. The premise is that Hitler has been transported to the year 2014 and ends up writing a book about his experiences, which is eventually turned into a movie, titled Look Who's Back. Next-level meta, obviously.
However, the movie-of-a-book-within-a-movie-of-a-book mindfuck doesn't by any means define Mr. Wnendt's very exciting film. Rather, Look Who's Back skips between clownish physical comedy, dark satire, experimental film, and serious social and political commentary. Happily for the viewer, it doesn't sit for too long in any of these, keeping us on our toes until the end, when the serious concern starts to seep in, especially considering the popularity of one father to Ms. Ivanka Trump in this country. My drama teacher at school used to talk about the "serious laugh", in which the playwright would make the audience laugh in order to open their mouths, and into the gaping holes slip a serious message. At the time, this seemed to me to be a pretty gross and somewhat phallic metaphor, but that is exactly what this film does so well. It's on Netflix, so there's literally no excuse not to watch this alternately delightful and terrifying piece of cinema. //#ACTINGCredit to Haoyan of America, very excited to see the final product music video that this still comes from.
P.S. spot the Indie Author Ned Beauman has a blog and it is bomb.This blog. It is all the things I want in my life. Spotify playlists with zero followers (well - one, now) about Abraham and Isaac, excerpts from clinical studies on incredibly esoteric topics, and links to Beauman's new stories make "Oh my god look at its little face" a treasure chest of the internet. It almost feels like an old curiosities-and-oddities shop you wandered into in the Czech Republic only to discover that the items on display were not skulls from the bone church down the road, but passages of out-of-contest words that have become beautiful in their new home.
Among the many beautiful things Father John Misty has created lies I Went To The Store One Day, the closing song from his most recent album, I Love You, Honeybear.
The opening instrumental is light and intimate, with a little bit of bravado. Maybe you think of an old song recounting the love between a circus clown and a tightrope walker, which a busking trio would perform to you in Venice. Then comes Joshua Tillman's voice, and then his words, "We met. . . In a parking lot." It is unexpected, and you're not sure whether to laugh or just keep listening to try to untangle the narrative, but it also doesn't really matter. Tillman goes on to list his purchases from the fateful trip to the store, "coffee and cigarettes / Fire wood and bad wine long since gone". The effects on him, however, are not so transient - the woman he met will become his wife. This detail, along with any other glimpse of who she might be, is not mentioned in the song. Rather, he focuses on the effect of their love on himself "I've become jealous, rail-thin, prone to paranoia when I'm stoned", and their future "let's buy a plantation house and let the year grow til we don't need the signs that say 'keep out'". As it goes on, this lovely piece swings between tender ballad and ironic comedy, "insert here a sentiment re our golden years", but the simple surprise and vulnerability in the lines "For love to find. . . Us of all people / I never thought it'd be so simple" place it firmly in the territory of Love Song, and one of my favourites of those. Over the millennia that it took to carve the Grand Canyon, there was one thing keeping those little, anthropomorphised drops of water going. Well - there were two. One was gravity. And the other was the thought that one day, one woman would swipe right on a man because she liked the picture of him standing above the cavern they carved. When things got particularly rough, the droplets would imagine that maybe - just maybe - the two would end up fucking in a dark apartment in Harlem. That would really motivate them. That, and the irresistible pull of gravity.
But in all seriousness, what is up with all the Tinder men on rocks? Is it that what Mikayal, Abdulla, Shaun, and Jae all have in common (other than their obvious love of rocks) is that they have found a way to tap into the female psyche? And if this is the case, are we so deeply attracted to the men on rocks because it shows us that they are physically strong enough to walk from the car park to the edge of the canyon, or because it reminds us of the bit in the Lion King with the primate holding baby Simba up on top of that rock? Either way, Men of Tinder, don't stop. I love your photos of Me Standing On A Rock, if only to help sift the douche-bag chaff from the douche-bag wheat.
Redwood is one of those many exhibitions that I stumbled into by accident and had to drag myself out of. Ms. Lowe uses masks, both on faces and hands, to create something far more immediate and - in many ways - more relatable than naturalistic film can deliver. Everything about the film has been carefully crafted to draw the viewer into Lowe's world and evoke a rather strong sense of sentimental memory. As well as reminding me of Švankmajer's work, there is something of a piece of work I saw a couple of years ago in the Palacio de Cristal, in Madrid. In The Marionette Maker by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, the viewer walks around and peers into a trailer of a puppet creator. The artist, an overwhelmingly life-like sculpture asleep on the bed, is surrounded by her living and moving creations. Despite Ms. Lowe's work not actually including any puppets, the painted masks her actors wear, and the jointed hands covering their own, suggest the narrowed expressive text available to marionettes. It is this reduced language of facial expression and movement that allows Redwood to draw broader strokes of human experience. And despite the lack of popular realism in the film, the viewer recognises these strokes as part of their own lives, real or imagined. This is the magic of what Molly Lowe, with the support of Pioneer Works, has created.
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