Red Rover, Red Rover, Red Riding Came Over : The Lost Blog Post

[Author's Note: The following is an unfinished blog post. I just couldn't figure out how to wrap words around these films. I took notes; I have plenty more to say. If you watch them/it, let me know.]

They are no longer running separately at the IFC Center in NYC, and I don't know if all three films ("1974," "1980," and "1983") making up the Channel Four trilogy Red Riding are still available "On Demand" from Time Warner Cable. Eventually you should be able to rent them through Netflix.com and other venues. And, of course, one is always welcome to purchase such things on DVD (or in their original 4-book form).

However you are able to do it, I highly recommend you experience Red Riding, but be warned -- it's hard stuff.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2010, I braved the first weekend of The IFC Road Show tour and watched all three parts in one 5 1/2 hour sitting. Since then, I have felt a bit paralyzed by the experience -- unable to say much or write on the subject, studiously avoiding all the reviews piling up around me. I just couldn't process the totality of what I'd seen.

How can I describe what happened, to me or onscreen, in an intelligible way for those who haven't experienced it? I still feel in danger of failure. My marathon viewing is partly the culprit. Wannabe cinemaniac that I am, I'd never before sat for so long in one theater (two 15-minute breaks notwithstanding). The closest I'd come was watching the overlong Inland Empire in that same theater (during which, frankly, I wished to take a nap so that it would be over a little sooner). But it's the films themselves that really cripple me. I would both watch all three again immediately in a quest for a deeper understanding, at the same time that I never want to go back to their world.

Watching Red Riding the night I did was my chosen alternative to several Super Bowl parties, and it felt freeing to choose a wide parcel of film over that nearly compulsory (in this country, anyway) day of sport. That Sunday evening, at the movies, I felt like myself -- asserting my own identity, thrilled to be sinking deeper into the soft chair of the theater as I became immersed in the brutal, velvet world of the R.R. trilogy. I felt like myself, as I just wrote, yet accosted, and perilously close to despair. So it progressed.

I've seen many films (and television shows) with story lines revolving around serial killers. But Red Riding is different. It's a horse of a bloodier color, with a relentless gait. At moments I could stand apart as a viewer "watching a film." And then, if I may be so bold, there were moments I would feel a sensation that something desperately important was happening.

Occasionally I was central and centered, a bit like Roger Ebert is described in Esquire's now infamous article. Though, dear me, I'm not really comparing myself to Ebert, I did find myself feeling crucial and powerful, scribbling notes into a ringed pad in the dark, surrounded by the films, but held apart. And then I felt, at other times, like a lost child or faceless stranger in their world. My persona slipped away and I lost myself in the spectacle. It was "just a movie" (three movies), but it felt like more.

So, it was/they were (each and together) a singular experience and singular experiences. I was surrounded and enveloped at once by beauty, intelligence, talent, and horror. I was no one and the world was impossibly angry and raw. How could there be any good left in it?

As I mentioned above, the presentation I attended included two fifteen-minute breaks. These breaks came between films one and two. During each intermission, I found myself in the IFC's lovely, lonesome women's bathroom, dug deep along one edge of the theater's mouse-maze of a basement (yes, perhaps this description is a bit dramatic, but that's how it felt).

Anyway, watching films often makes me feel vulnerable, but this was a special night. Each time I took my stretch-my-legs-buy-a-snack-breathe-again break, I found myself in that bathroom, looking introspectively into the mirror, my eyes slightly red from strain -- and, each time, I felt compelled to apply a coat of the lipstick that just happened to be rolling around the bottom of my bag. I twice found I needed to put lipstick on before I could return to my seat and begin the next film in the trilogy. Why? It didn't feel like vanity. It felt like necessity. I think it was armor. I applied the color so I might feel more human, more tied to something outside the off-kilter, too familiar, wrong and punishing world of Red Riding.

Loop de loop.

In the Loop is a tricky, wry film that somehow manages to be outrageously funny and deeply depressing at once. Call me a cynic when it comes to Washington, war, and international relations, but I have a feeling there really might be a battle of evil vs. the inept (with a few intelligent people caught impotently in the periphery) playing out in the back rooms of foreign politics. However, I doubt real life machinations are this funny, or that the cursing is so inspired.

Stylistically, although it isn't suggested in the plot that there is a documentary film crew shooting the action, the hand-held camerawork and dialogue's racing wit mean the movie unfolds like a there's been a marriage between the British series "The Office" and the American version of "The Office," one of whom has had a brief affair with Wag the Dog but come back to the relationship ready to work it out. It's about politics, as I've insinuated, instead of paper and is capped off by a lovely cameo from Steve Coogan. In a special twist, American political aid Chad is Gareth, British Secretary of State for International Development Simon Foster is David Brent, Dharma's mom bleeds from the mouth, and Tony Soprano wants peace (but, then didn't he always, to a certain extent)?

This isn't to say it's derivative. On the contrary, In the Loop is its own animal, a thick film that starts strong and keeps firing until the end. "It's all fun and games until somebody gets an eye poked out," as the saying goes. I was left in the dust like nearly everyone in the movie when it was all over, but -- wartime or peacetime -- it's never really all over, is it? Not while there's a politician left in Washington or Number 10 Downing Street...

I See the Moon and the Moon sees Me.

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Moon (dir. Duncan Jones, aka David Bowie's son) is one of those films I meant to see in the theater when it first came out, simply on the strength of the poster, but I never made a priority. Lately, I've been seeing the title popping up on critics' "Best of 2009" lists (including that of the previous post), and when I re-watched the uneven The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy after Christmas with my parents it reminded me of my fondness for Sam Rockwell (dating back to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). All these signs pointed to, "Watch Moon!," so I made it a priority on my Netflix queue (better a late priority than never) and got it done this evening.

You know what? I can't take the chance that I might give something away and ruin the film for someone who hasn't seen it.

But I would like to talk about the following topics:

• overlapping edits
• claustrophobia versus space
• isolation and insanity
• unobtrusive CGI - finally!
  
• should robot voices be faster?
  
• future/not future
• low-budget look
• Primer -- and if you've enjoyed Moon, but not watched Primer, you must rent it immediately
• Effy from Skins
• Bladerunner
• Solyaris
• best use of smileys in life or film
  
• memory
• oh, how the years in space might mellow one
• the dying and the elderly
• some massively mad green screen work

Now! Once you've seen it, we can get together for coffee and discuss.