becca hyman

I’m getting this out of the way before I post more art. We’re required to review the art films we’ve been watching as part of our contextual studies segment of foundation. Got to say, i’ve fucking loved these cinema trips.

We began with Richard Linklater’s ‘Slacker’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9f9M6UAYb0

Kind of a poor trailer, but the thing is, it’s a lot like ‘Waking Life’ where the focus isn’t so much the plot, but the concept of the film in the first place. Slacker opens with Linklater himself (but doesn’t he look like Owen Wilson!) as the guy in the taxi talking about the Wizard of Oz and any of the other paths on the yellow brick road she could have taken. This basically opens up the whole premise of parallel universes and uncharted lives. This bit was the most interesting part of the film to me; it’s this idea that for every path you take, the very thought of the road not taken or other option(s) or whatever becomes its own dislodged reality in another universe actually happening while we live this one. This guy had this theory that dreams, especially ones set in places you’ve never even seen before were like glimpses into these other universes and that really struck me. I could totally animate that.

But the thing about Slacker is, it’s a film of vignettes sewn together by chance meetings and routine interaction. Basically, the focus of the film shifts from character to character almost every five minutes. Every so often the camera will pan away from a scene onto a passerby and follow them and we are introduced to a whole new set of people and what goes on in their lives. There were some shitty bits, I’m not gonna lie. But there are stories which stand out in my memory, like the twenty-somethings whose roommate had just mysteriously upped and left; the man who was convinced the apocalypse was nigh and that the government was secretly shipping people off to the moon; the chubby geek’s JFK assassination theories as a way of chatting up this girl who clearly wasn’t wearing a bra because you could totally see her nipples through her tank top ETC. The thing is, just as you were getting interested in someone’s storyline the camera would pan off to someone else and it started to get kind of frustrating, but i guess THAT’S THE POINT. It all comes back to the Wizard of Oz theory guy. I wanted to know what was happening to a certain character but when the camera shifted to someone else and a new story, you still knew the last one was happening on the other side of town, the other story is still panning out and all those previous characters are still living and interacting but the camera’s not on them so we’ll never know what’s happening.

Overall, I dunno. I’d give it like a 4ish out of 5. The good thing was when I fell asleep for a bit in the cinema (I was tired), I woke up and hadn’t missed anything because it was an altogether entirely different story anyway.

Last week was Robert Altman’s ‘The Long Goodbye’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeNyD9UFXHs

First of all. Ross & Monica’s dad from Friends. But 30 years ago. Ahahahahhahaha.
OK. There was something really cool about this film. Maybe it’s the subtle wit in the dialogue, the ginger cat who’s really picky about his food, or the neighbours who constantly get their tits out in the background (for continuity?). I’m going to go with the tits. They also felt the need to play every different possible version alive of that song The Long Goodbye in the background every 5 seconds. That, and the camera panning away and zooming into the background at the end of scenes seemed to be the recurring theme of the film. Honestly the plot is a load of balls. The best friend of the protagonist, some sort of private unpaid detective who lives on a tall bridge with an elevator opposite a naked yoga class, appears to kill his wife and then mysteriously die, but he didn’t really kill his wife nor is he dead but he stole a shitload of money from some gang and then somehow a hot girl got smacked in the face with a coke bottle.
But you sort of can’t help but enjoy it. The detective reminds me of Nathan from Misfits. The ending felt completely unresolved and the plot was pretty unbelievable anyway but the film is upheld by the brilliant dry wit. I think I probably liked this better than ‘Slacker’, and I’m a big Linklater fan.

This week was Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Une Femme est une Femme’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-BK0XiXfPU

This has been my favourite film by far so far. I was apprehensive about subtitles because my contact lenses were sticking to my eyes and I’d had about 2 hours sleep the night before but the film is really about visual humour and it was pretty uncomplicated French i probably could have understood it without the subtitles. probably.

It’s about this frenchwoman who is played by Anna Karina, who is probably THE HOTTEST WOMAN EVER, who desperately wants a baby. God knows why, she works in a strip club, is utterly immature and whiny and she can only really get away with it because she’s so damn hot. But anyway. Her husband isn’t really fussed. Some other guy is hounding her, claiming he loves her and all that. But the film mainly focuses on the strange but hilarious relationship between her and her husband as she tries to convince him that they should have a baby. This woman is completely erratic. Like insane. She can’t seem to make her mind up about ANYTHING. Her husband has a hell of lot of patience and manages to play her flaws against her to comic effect, like inviting random men to inpregnate her if she wants a baby that badly. Ha ha ha….hilarious.

Like ‘Slacker’, it’s kind of a hard to peg. I guess because there isn’t really a beginning middle or end. But, without a doubt, 5 stars.

I love film wednesdays.

Ok, so I made this “temporary book” as part of our Make 3 Books Project. We had to choose from a list of book titles. I interpreted Temporary Book as though the actual pages of the book were temporary, like internet pages. So I came up with this:

can you imagine if books malfunctioned and paper just wouldn’t load?

Some people were like is this a critique on digital book readers like the Kindle and all that shit? How they’re intangible and impersonal? And it wasn’t, but if anyone asks, YES it is social commentary and they’ll go ooooh and I’ll secretly think haha you gullible dick.

We got to talking about book readers in class. Why the fuck would you want to scroll or click through a book? What about turning pages? Texture? New book smell? Pop up books? Dog-eared ends? Using your imagination? Eventually, books will be little iPads with holographic characters and we won’t even have to think for ourselves.

Welcome to the literature armageddon.