Killer of Sheep

(backlogged to 9/10/07, 1:21am)

I'm glad I found out about this movie being shown at the Red Vic, since it's apparently kind of hard to find.

After about two and a half weeks, the strongest image in my mind of this movie is the scene when Stan dances with his wife, the way she starts to so hungrily kiss and grope him and how distractedly he just kind of walks away; it could've come off as too disaffected like the worst Antonioni or something, but it doesn't, it felt really potent. And then Stan's wife standing there, and does she leave the frame or not? and the window, empty, divided into nine smaller squares of white against the dark gray and black everything else, burning away in the middle of the frame. The way Burnett held the shot, too, on just that empty window. It's just so amazing when the reality of a specific object in actual time pokes through the narrative of a movie. (is that maybe part of the secret of how this thing works?)

The whole part where Stan goes with his friend to get the motor, the quirky behavior of the people in the house who sell him the motor, his friend hurting his fingers and then carelessly leaving the motor on the back of the truck, that whole scene was probably the most narratively fulfilling: it was funny and heartbreaking, very much in the way of an old Italian movie, like Umberto D or The Bicycle Thief.

The scene toward the beginning with the kid peeking out from behind the wooden board and the other kids throwing rocks at him, that scene was kind of ruined by my reading of Ebert's review before watching it. I tried to hard to make what I was seeing seem as perfect as how it had sounded as described by Ebert: there's a true instance of a spoiler!

Many of the reviews had said the scenes in the slaughterhouse were so disturbing, but I wasn't really all that disturbed by them. I mean, slaughterhouses suck, but I already knew that. Why was that such a sticking point for so many of the reviewers?

American Cannibal

(6/24/07. Red Vic w/Ell & Erin. 7:00p)

1) My fellow filmgoer said to me that there would have certainly been ways for the makers of the documentary to find out if the girl had actually died or not, and I'm unsure about whether or not that's true, but I definitely was a little uncomfortabl...(read more)e about the way they kind of made the confusion the focal point of the end. I guess, if you're making a documentary and someone in that documentary suddenly and unexpectedly almost dies, it would be pretty difficult to resist the feeling that you'd just struck oil, at least for the part of you that is thinking constantly about how you can shape everything you're filming into a narrative. The death of an innocent is, after all, pretty damn dramatic. But if you're trying to make a point that reality TV is disgusting because the people making it are cavalier about the lives their filming, jumping all over the result of that carelessness and running around the country to shoot the insouciant face of that girl's brother seems to kind of loosen your foothold on the moral high ground. I guess if they reall do have no idea what happened to the girl, though, there's not much else to do with it.

2) I sort of kept expecting throughout the film that there would be some dramatic "reveal" moment, where the audience would suddenly be let in on some level of trickery or plotting on the parts of either Gil & Dave or the documentary filmers. I kind of still am expecting that.