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The Blue Velvet Project, #100
Second #4700, 78:20 “Donny! Donny! Donny, no! No! Donny mommy loves you!” This is moments after Frank has said, in reference to Dorothy, “Let Tits see her kid.” The tenderness of her hand upon the door molding. A glimpse of a woman in pink in the room with Donny. “What the real world is: that is a very difficult problem” (Haruki Murakami, IQ84). The two lamps in the corner of the room. Who puts two lamps in the same space? Dorothy’s hand, again, the elegant length of her fingers, and the hands of the woman sitting beneath the light switches. […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #99
Second #4653, 77:33 The sidebar exchange between Frank and Ben, and an exchange of money, too, and a mysterious slip of paper. Ben drops a pill into Frank’s mouth. Frank, in return, says something cryptic about Detective Gordon (Fred Pickler). Another frame-within-a-frame, as the doorframe moldings serve as movie screen curtains. In his essay “Theater and Cinema, Part II,” André Bazin wrote that a screen is not a frame like that of a picture but a mask which allows only part of the action to be seen. When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is […]
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Your Brother. Remember? — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Your Brother. Remember? opens for a theatrical run in NYC at the reRun Gastropub on Friday, April 6, 2012. Visit the film’s Facebook page or Oberzan’s official website to learn more.) For those of us who, as adults, continue to take the preposterous cliff-jump that is making movies with nary a paycheck in sight, there are almost certainly VHS/Hi-8/mini-DV tapes hidden somewhere that contain our earliest “work.” Most of this “work” can be categorized as such: backyard/basement/garage variations on—or outright recreations of—whatever big-budget spectacles we had most recently encountered. As a combination performance artist/filmmaker in his mid-30s with just two […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #98
Second #4606, 76:46 Frank has just hurt Jeffrey, and now it’s Ben’s turn. A casual sort of hurtfulness. The frame comes from second number 6 in a shot that lasts just over 53 seconds. In the background, staring back at the camera (at us) is the same Party Girl from earlier. The frame, cut vertically by the curtain and Dorothy’s right arm, is pulled apart by a clash of gazes and lines of vision: Dorothy’s and Frank’s leading our eyes toward Ben, and Ben’s and Hunter’s leading our eyes towards off-screen Jeffrey. In Barry Gifford’s 1990 novel Wild at Heart […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #97
Second #4559, 75:59 Could it be that Dorothy is gazing not at Frank, but at Ben, the one who holds her son hostage in his apartment? If so, it’s not a meaning that registers upon watching the movie in real time. But at this moment—the moment of the isolated frame—a different layer of information is revealed. Separated from the frames that come immediately before and after it, does the solitary frame mean something different when studied as an image in its own right? Is a single film frame from a movie with over 170,000 frames the equivalent to a single […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #96
Second #4512, 75:12 Dean Stockwell has said that he based his character Ben on a Carol Burnett sketch: “You know that thing that I do with my eyes? Carol Burnett had a character of this super snooty woman and she was always like this. I stole it and I told her one time and she laughed her head off when I told her.” And in an alternate-universe sort of way, this entire sequence at Ben’s is like one of the extended Carol Burnett Show sketches from the mind 1970s, with Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. The awkward pauses, the physical […]
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Artificial Paradises — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Artificial Paradises world premiered at the 2011 International Film Festival Rotterdam before screening at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. It opens theatrically in New York City at the reRun Gastropub on Friday, March 30, 2012. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Yes, Yulene Olaizola’s Artificial Paradises is about drug addiction. But not only does Olaizola take her time in revealing this agenda, her patient filmmaking and reverence for the gorgeous natural environment in which she shoots keeps that agenda from elbowing its way into the foreground. It’s this gentle approach that distinguishes Artificial Paradises from the rest of […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #95
Second #4465, 74:25 1. Dorothy and Frank split their angles of vision; everyone is watching everyone. But it is Dorothy who suggests and defines the off-screen space, the space where Donny is kept behind a closed door. 2. Ben has just said, to one of the Party Girls, “Darling, could you bring some glasses, and we’ll have a beer with Frank. Please, sit down.” 3. Ben’s quiet formalism is not at all ironic. Rather, his decorum (which Frank calls “suave”) suggests that there is a proper and an improper way to conduct matters of evil in this world, and his […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #94
Second #4418, 73:38 At Ben’s, at last. The woman, the doll, and the painting above them—framed by the green (velvet?) curtains—telegraph Frank’s entrance. They are a tightly composed grouping in an open frame, whose curtains anticipate the vaudeville show which is about to unfold, complete with Ben’s lip-synched performance of “In Dreams,” some stock violence, and a running gag that features Jeffrey as the butt of a joke he does not understand. Ben’s apartment is an anarchy of crossed signals and mental jump cuts. The year after Blue Velvet’s release, Robert Coover’s story collection A Night at the Movies, or, […]
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Lady Vengeance: A Genre Fan’s Guide to 2012 New Directors/New Films
New Directors/New Films is known for bringing some of the freshest, boldest films to light, and not necessarily just for New York audiences. Arthouse theaters around the country often make selections from this well-regarded festival’s programming. The relatively high-brow co-presentation of the The Museum of Modern Art and the The Film Society of Lincoln Center is not, however, generally considered a place to discover new genre film, despite its reputation for supporting ballsy young upstarts. Yet perhaps the increasing cultural and cinematic significance of sufficiently well-made genre films is now keeping them from being overlooked by the festival that saves […]
