The Brown Bunny
Films, a.k.a movies, rarely appeal to me. Mostly, I weary at yet another set up of another back story at the beginning in order to set up the “drama” of the middle and the end. Two related films recently on TV, Mission to Mars and Red Planet, both tormented me with their story-by-numbers. How do people sit through this ideological pap without rebelling!? While these are recognisbly generic movies, they seem very close to the liberal pretentiousness of Anthony Minghella’s work (I say this despite the latter being a fanatical Pompey fan). Is this what distinguishes artisitic success from failure?
I want something else. Usually, I return to the scandalously inadequate DVD of Godard’s Eloge de l’Amour to see what is possible. The British director Mike Figgis watched this film and felt compelled to write about it. He remembers “once feeling anger at Alexander Walker for describing [Godard] as the ‘great French bore’ - or less anger than a sense of shame at the mundanity of our own cinema culture and the pride that people like Walker seem to take in their own boorishness.”
This happens every day to me. At least, when I read Bookslut last Friday!
Perhaps such boorishness caused Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny to get such viciously bad reviews last year. It was booed out of Cannes. Actually, I thought Buffalo 66 was awful and had no intention of ever watching anything he directed again. However, I’ve just seen the trailer for the film and was extremely impressed. Even if the film itself is dreadful, this trailer should be enough.
The music is alt-country-wonderful and the split screen works like I’ve never seen before. One critic explains: “The thing is, if Bunny was an Abbas Kiarostami film about a dusty Iranian traveling thousands of miles, people would be falling all over themselves to praise it.” Quite.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Found photos and music
- Godard: old and new
- Godard tells it how it is
- Starship Troopers Just taken delivery of th…
- Eloge De L�Amour Just seen Jean-Luc Godard�s l…
