00 Intertextuality: movies about Films and Filmmaking (meta-films)

a little predictable... ain't it?

-You've read The Three Musketeers?
I saw the film. Why?
-Because in it (this is really in Twenty Years Later), Porthos -tall, strong, a little stupid, he's never thought in his life- He has to place a bomb in a cellar, to blow it up. He does it, he places the bomb, lights the fuse, then he runs away, of course.
But suddenly he begins to think: What about? How it is possible to put one foot before the other?
You must have thought about that, too. So he stops running. He can't go on, he can't move forward. The bomb explodes, the cellar falls on him: he holds it up with his shoulders. But after a day, or maybe two, he is crushed to death.
The first time he thought, it killed him.
-Why did you tell me that story?
No reason, just to talk
-Why must one always talk?
Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean.
-Perhaps, but can one?
I don't know. I've found that we can't live without talking. I'd like to live without talking. Yes, it would be nice, wouldn't it?
Like loving one another more. But it isn't possible.
- But why? Words should express just what one wants to say. Do they betray us? But we betray them, too. One should be able to express oneself. It has been done in writing.
Think: someone like Plato can still be understood - he can. Yet he wrote in Greek, 2,500 years ago. No one really knows the language, at least, not exactly. Yet something gets through, so we should be able to express ourselves. And we must.
- Why must we? To understand each other?
We must think, and for thought we need words. There's no other way to think: to communicate, one must talk; that is our life.
- Yes, but it is very difficult. I think life should be easy. Your talk of The Three Musketeers, may make a good story but it's terrible.
Yes, but it's a pointer. I believe one learns to talk well, only when one has renounced life for a time. That's the price.

-So, to speak is fatal?
Speaking is almost a resurrection in relation to life. Speech is another life from when one does not speak
So, to live in speech one must pass through the death of life without speech. I may not be putting it clearly, but there is a kind of ascetic rule that stops one from talking well until one sees life with detachment.
-But one can't live everyday life with... I don't know...With detachment. We balance, that's why we pass from silence... to words. We swing between the two, because it's the movement of life.
From everyday life one rises to a life we call superior: the thinking life. But this life presupposes one has killed the everyday too elementary life.
-Then thinking and talking are the same thing?
So I believe; Plato said so. It's an old idea. One cannot distinguish the thought from the words that express it. An instant of thought can only
be grasped through words.
- So one must talk and risk lying?
Lies, too, are part of our quest. Errors and lies are very similar. I don't mean ordinary lies, Iike "I promise to come tomorrow, but I don't", as I didn't want to. You see, those are ploys. But a subtle lie is little different from an error. One searches and can't find the right word. That's why you didn't know what to say: You were afraid of not finding the right word. That's the explanation.
- How can one be sure of having found the right word?
One must work It needs an effort. One must speak in a way that is right, doesn't hurt says what has to be said, does what has to be done without hurting or bruising. One must try to be in good faith.
- Someone told me: "There is truth in everything, even in error."


-What do you think about love? Shouldn't love be the only truth?
For that, love would always have to be true. Do you know anyone who knows at once what he loves? No. When you're twenty you don't know. All you know are bits and pieces, you make arbitrary choices. Your "I love" is an impure affair.
But to be completely at one with what you love, you need maturity. That means searching. This is the truth of life That's why love is a solution, on condition that it is true.


- I'd like to go to the Louvre
No, I don't like looking at pictures
- Why? Art and beauty are life
I adore you
- And I love you
Why not come and live with me?

1963

(1973)

Pretty far from the others Dirty Harry, this weak last chapter has got few ideas, poorly represented, if you take away the action, which is also restrained.

What's really to be remembered is the chase by the remote-controlled toy car (wielding a bomb) around San Francisco streets.

This is the kind of film that tries to prove mockingly, that "if god does not exist everything is permitted". The provocation starts with the original title "It happened in your neighborhood", a joke as to make you feel guilty for have not noticed it; and cinema should be the other accomplice.

It is true that we live in a reality that is not ours anymore, from which we are distant, (the post-modern theories), but here Ben -the murderess- well knows what he's doing -and can distinguish live from dead- so there is no giusification to the violence, and voyeurism that the film project us.

I really liked the way to portray as normal his way of thinking and living, and the fact that it prevailed on common sense, but -unlike more serious and less complacent films like henry portrait of a serial killer- the irony of the absurd cannot obscure the immorality and stupidity of the work itself: the film pretends to give responsibility to the viewer, but instead it just puts our backs to the wall (chained to the fate of the crew, with no way out).

Eventually, the film seems to mistake that cinema is not the media, they are two different separeted things, and in no way it should be empowered to trap you into this.

It is not difficult for a film buff, judging a film as excessive as NBK ... What else can remember the bald head of Harrelson, if not the cannibals of Wes Craven, or the sit com, Clockwork Orange ... without considering that the film moves into a hyper-realism influenced by Wild at Heart, the precipitate Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, and obscenity and overflowing trash by John Waters ...
That said, the logic of the Hollywood director who plays the experimental (with tiresome, messy and ridiculous payoff in the long run), is like: hey, the media are wrong, not me, I'm just an artist and I can do whatever i want; with the result that no evil here is a complaint, but it is also amplified, especially for the average person, who ignores the misdeeds of the corporate media.

what if someone with a creepy mature voice calls you on the phone, asking: Where were you on Friday the 13th?
Well, if you are in a horror movie, and you're a nice blondie teenager, there are not many options... just get frightened and start to run with no direction, until they slash you with a knife...
This is the starting point of a merciless parody of horror films, which seeks to overturn all the rules of the genre, updating it at our times, but falling at the climax: the ending ...
as a matter of fact, going forward the film becomes a forced teen movie, and not so intelligent as it was begun, showing its own poor mechanism, and it's not saved even by the references to Dawson's Creek, or the punch to unsympathetic Courtney Cox, because now you just want it to end, and they kill each others!

The film is both too vague and politically correct, so that prefers to do praise to life in general, with its negative aspects, instead of sinking to a radical critique of life of our society (and how we got here), remaining on the surface, so as not to realize the hopelessness of some of the protagonists themselves, and this is very misleading.
On the other hand, however, it's able to move something in you, because it touches the right chord, explaining how the world would be without passion, art, culture and cinema

Les herbes folles is a strange film which reminds me a bit Los Abrazos Rotos: during the first part, it seems even poetic, an old-fashioned conflicted fairy tales of Resnais about casuality of life, despite the frivolity of plot (a man found the wallet of a woman and later wants to know her, becoming obsessed); but the change of direction that the film takes, leads to engage hatches of nonsense, because the script turning point is when the man cut up the wheels of the car of his victim, to prevent her escape (since then she first calls the police, but soon seeks him desperately).
In all that, the gentleman's wife is a mere spectator to what happens, and this makes it all the more shocking.

But the film is not only that, it is also a parable about contemporary cinema (almost as Godard's criticism), especially Hollywood, where the happy ending is the forced landing point of any sentimental or dramatic work (the director underlines the well known riff of the 20th Century Fox, as the background for a kiss, when the film seems to be over, but isn't really)

The formal elegance still contrasts with the crazy plot, which becomes way more laughable, and the opener master of the Novelle Vague favorite themes: memory, inability to communicate, existentialism and sentimentality, break before the reopening of the shape started in Melo, from the questionable choice of actors to inconclusiveness; with the result that the film does not go very far, and remains something inscrutable (for example, the reference to Flaubert seems out of place), moving out instead than inward.

"Dist-suburbia" is a similar piece of work to teens movies of the eighties as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, or Mystery Date, films about cinema connected to technologies such as Rear window, scream and American Beauty, and the Joe Dante's movies The Hole and The 'Burbs.
Indeed there isn't much original in it, and it just deals with the usual clichés of the suburban American teen life, in the absence of parents.
The real problem is that on the side of thriller, the film is a bland try, especially the ending, which seems an unnecessarily change, because it's not prepared the release of a serial killer, and the plot twist does not seem to sort any effect, so that no real disturb is caused.

Made by collage and alternating between archive footage and shot fragments, it's an allegory about the Kluge's struggle for the New German Cinema movement, and the state of art in the present capitalist society, where everything is a product to sell out.

Perhaps too ambitious and cryptic, it didn't pass well the test of time... Wim Wender's Der stand der dinge (1982) , is some kind of a remake, but you can notice some influence even in Der Himmel uber Berlin.

What remains today is the surreal atmosphere, and good ambitions / message.

Golden Lion at the 33° Venice Film Festival (1968)

The film is a modest revival of the works of Charlie Kaufman, but on the contrary, it does not ask questions, nor it seeks to respond.
the package is welcome, but it leaves a sense of frustration, incompleteness, and lack of depth. Even Paul Jamatti seems not sure about what the film is about. It is like a film about soul, but without soul.
It remains to hope that the forthcoming work of Sophie Barthes may be more mature and courageous.