Lunch Links
An experimental animation brings new life to discarded moments.
“Recycled” (2013) dir. Lei Lei, Thomas Sauvin
Thomas Sauvin’s art involves taking pictures, but he’s not a photographer. He takes discarded photo negatives (ask your parents what these are, kids) from landfills and recycling centers near his home in Beijing and selectively scans them into collections. He’s scrolled through thousands of pictures of families at home and on vacation, posing stiffly for the camera and caught unaware, welcoming babies and showing off new appliances. Moments sacred and banal.
Seen individually, the photos are boring. It can be tough enough to sustain interest in the vacation snapshots of people you do know. But by sifting through years and years of these pictures, Sauvin creates portraits of entire eras of Beijing. The commonalities between photos – styles, subjects and even the amount of photos in the trash as cameras become cheaper and more accessible – can be arranged to record time periods in strata, like the colored stripes of canyon walls. He shows them in books, an Instragram account, and archive projects like Bejing Silvermine (bonus Lunch Link at that site where you can find a short doc on his process).
For “Recycled” Sauvin provided the artist Lei Lei thousands of images rescued from a silver nitrate recycling plant. Lei Lei took a couple years selecting and animating more than 3000 photos to “build up a portrait of the capital city and the life of her inhabitants over the last thirty years,” per the introductory title. Lei juxtaposes the pictures to draw out their commonalities; the most entertaining sections are the ones that line up everybody’s same instinct to photograph a person at a scenic point, with the jump cuts between the versions transforming each tourist into the next.
According to Andrei Trakovsy, motion pictures sculpt with time. Usually a sequence of frames, i.e. a shot, is the building block of film “sculptures”. In “Recycled” the building blocks are single frames, each composed anonymously and independent of one another, and the film turns the discreet pieces into a unifying whole. Time collapses. People occupy the same space on a rock or next to a statue of Ronald McDonald. Families age and members appear and disappear. Degraded photos create a feeling of memories escaping, of time already lost to the landfill. Thousands of people had an unwitting hand in the creation of this brilliant, beautiful time sculpture, and the accidental contributions of their daily lives makes it an even more poignant portrait of their place on Earth.
This is not a particularly phone-friendly selection, so apologies to mobile viewers. If you get a chance I recommend putting it up on a larger screen and, even better, find speakers or headphone that allow you to immerse yourself in the enchanting audioscape by experimental musician Zafka.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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Lunch Links
State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Burn After Reading – I think this is a perfect movie, but confusingly I wouldn’t put it in my Coens top-tier. I think they achieve everything they set out to do with it, all of the cast are outstanding and I particularly love how much the overblown spy-movie score and even the cinematography are in on the joke. But it’s a perfect 8/10 movie for me rather than a perfect 10/10 movie, even if that doesn’t make sense. I think they set out to make a nasty little black comedy about broken people ruining each others lives and they nailed the assignment, but they have so many movies that go above and beyond.
“I think they set out to make a nasty little black comedy about broken people ruining each others lives”
My hot take is that this is not the Coens parodying spy/conspiracy thrillers, but them parodying rom-coms, like the incredible Coming Up Daisy. Which makes it more savage! “I guess we learned not to do it again” is a depressing thing to say about love.
“I’m fucked if I know what we did.”
“Yes, sir. It’s, uh… hard to say.”
Agreed that it’s not really taking on spy / conspiracy stuff, that’s just an extra joke on top of everything else.
As you noted, Burwell’s score is arguably too good at the spy mimicry, so straight-faced a parody it makes the nonsense feel real
There’s also moments, like with Ozzie’s dad on the boat, where we see that this is all quite serious to the people involved. To all of them, it’s exactly as serious as the score would imply. We in the audience know better.
The most tragic thing about the entire chain of events is that we never got to read Osbourne’s mem-wa
I’m pretty sure it was Jim Emerson who imagined the brothers sitting in the editing room and cackling as they lay the bland sound of air conditioning under the very serious footsteps in the FBI hallways. This feels about right for a guess to their intentions.
X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes: The visuals in this never quite live up to Ray Milland’s impassioned, devastated speeches about them–the “flesh bathed in an acid of light” is the line that really makes you want (and fear) to see what he’s seeing, and nothing we get nails that the way I’d like. In general I could do with a bit more perceptual horror, like when Milland doesn’t recognize his own love interest because he can no longer easily tell people apart, since he’s always seeing past their skin, or when he longs for darkness he can no longer get. But there’s still a good bit to enjoy here, including the almost comedic swiftness of the pacing: “These eye drops might start affecting your brain,” Milland’s doctor friend warns him, and two seconds later, Milland’s heaved him out the window. Genuinely uncanny eyes in the final act, great smash-cut of an ending. But this is one of the rare movies where I kind of want a remake–maybe a graphic novel version–that can make Milland’s transformation more gradual and let us experience it more vividly and intimately.
Agreed on all this. This feels like Corman (or one of his compatriots) came up with this killer idea for the first ten pages and then… now what? The final ten minutes redeem it, but there’s a lot of searching around for a plot. I like how he becomes a free health clinic operator, but it feels really sleazy because he works for Don Rickles.
It’s a true sign of those patients’ desperation that they walk into a clinic, see Don Rickles is managing it, and don’t immediately turn around.
“Oh, I see your last physician prescribed stupid pills! I don’t think that’s gonna cure you of being a hockey puck.”
Also, with some shameless self-promotion, one of five movies Corman directed in that year: https://www.the-solute.com/a-quick-and-cheap-summary-of-roger-cormans-1963/
Damn, a great write-up and a very good year for Corman–this really captures the energy and rough-cut pleasures of his work. And now I need to see The Raven, especially since it led to this line: “The Raven was shot in a mere 15 days but it has the scope of a film that took… about 17.”
Great movie, although it was partly ruined for me by King’s idea for a better killer final line: “I can still see!”
Gladiator II – How short was the meeting where they decided to use Roman numerals?
It’s interesting to see Ridley Scott revisit old haunts. He’s always seemed like an auteur director with a journeyman’s approach to the script. Now we learn that Alien gave him thoughts on creation. A second Gladiator gives him thoughts on, uh, the first Gladiator.
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen that one, but luckily there’s flashbacks and callbacks to put it back in mind, even though this one takes place a generation later. Maximus seems to have made a large impression on Rome, even if it didn’t result in much material change. We’re given a new story of courtly intrigue and bloody arena battling that’s familiar in its bones, even while given a fresh veneer thanks to the ever-reliable Pedro Pascal and a beautiful Christmas ham courtesy Denzel Washington. I’ve seen some grumbling about lead Paul Mezcal as the new people’s hero, but his soulful face is handy for the scenes between the carnage, and when it comes to his prowess in the arena I’m inclined to give it a “eh, why not.”
There’s not a massive difference between Gladiator movies anyway, so hard to ding this one for being a retread of the first in places. It’s far more artful than the Spartacus series, but that one’s relentless debauchery makes this crumbling Rome feel tame. It’s a serviceable bit of adventure, elevated in places by Washington. Am I not entertained?
Everyone knows James Cameron made his pitch by writing “Alien$” on the whiteboard. But what if Ridley Scott made his pitch writing “A£ien?”
I imagine someone pitched “Glad2ator” and immediately got fired.
2 Glad 2 Iator
The text during the credits sequence says ‘Gladiator’ before the I duplicates itself to spell ‘GladIIator’. It’s so dumb it rules.
Willfully ignoring the seeming slight of Spartacus to be inspired by “a beautiful Christmas ham courtesy Denzel Washington” — good lord, why has he not yet played Scrooge?
He did The Preacher’s Wife and called it good on Christmas, I guess. I wasn’t slighting Spartacus! Just pointing out that after you’ve seen that show use blood spray as transitions, Scott’s gladiating seems tame in comparison.
OldSchoolSTL – Found a great rabbit hole of a YouTube channel, hosting episodes of the old local access shows “Velocity” and “Critical Mass.” We actually had an original music scene back then with lots of bands, circa 1989-1996. Oh, the wistfulness of it all. Highlights included Juliana Hatfield recording some bumpers for Velocity right on the riverfront, and a 1989 interview with Uncle Tupelo where everyone looks like the Muppet Babies version of themselves.
NBA, Warriors at Rockets (NBA Cup quarterfinals)
Well, from about four minutes left in the third quarter or so. I didn’t have much else to do while I was making dinner, and the Rockets are pretty good this year. Also, what a final minute of play, woooo basketball.
The Shield, “Smoked” and “Of Mice and Lem”
No lines of awful portent to mention this episode, because everything awful is happening immediately. One of the really remarkable things about this season is how it seems like every episode is raising the stakes, making it seem like it can’t get any worse than this, and then it gets worse. (Hell, even the side cases are horrific shit like the rat traps.)
But! We also get some great scenes and funny moments, as always. The highlights here are two speeches in the captain’s office, one about shit and one about piss. (And away from the captain’s office, one person is vomiting and two or three people are cumming, so I guess we have all our bases covered there.)
Also, yeah, the melodrama of “Disarm” works on thirteen-year-olds and this scene. “I used to be a little boy”… seems such a long time ago, huh?
NYPD Blue — Martinez and Lesniack fuck, which is prefaced by them telling everyone in the squad room that they are going to fuck. Martinez asks Simone for advice on what condom to use! This is your workplace, motherfucker! The 90s were a mistake, what the fuck is going on here. Worse is that the two of them have absolutely zero chemistry together, absolutely baffling why the show has been moving them together, and of course once they fuck (awful) Lesniack immediately turns into a jealous possessive shrew. You should’ve stayed a lesbian, lady.
Finally! A dick good enough to turn her into a harpy. Queen of the Harpies! Here’s your crown your majesty!
M*A*S*H, Season One, Episode One, “Pilot”
Fuck it, I never talked about this show episode-by-episode.
For a show that famously evolved a lot over time, this landed with full confidence. In the first two-and-a-half minutes, we get the whole shebang – doctors being wacky, people being slutty, Margaret and Frank being hypocritically slutty, Hawkeye and Trapper being wacky (hitting golf balls into a mine field), and all the wackiness dropping as soon as choppers come in.
(I actually forgot that this even opens with Hawkeye writing to his Dad. Also, it has Hawkeye dropping his famous phrase “finest kind”, though he’s actually referring to his martini.)
When you get right down to it, this is a show about being in The System. The goal is very simple – get Ho Jon enough money to go to university in America – and the funny thing is that the System is both obstacle (especially in the form of Frank and Margaret ruthlessly enforcing rules without regard for humanity) but also the solution.
The funny thing about Hawkeye is that while he wildly cheats the system to get what he wants (even his own self-created systems, stacking the deck so that Dish gets ‘raffled out’ to the obviously chaste Father Mulcahey), he’s still an active part of the system he’s rebelling against.
This episode ends with the first appearance of the characters simply being too competent to fire and escape their fate; they jokingly curse that they’re undone by their own desire to save human lives. However much Hawkeye hates the army, he’s a very effective and active part of it; part of his scheme comes from knowing the Canadians would have a push that would cause casualties to come in.
You can kind of see it as a cheat in multiple ways. Hawkeye gets to have his cake and eat it too in that he shows up the general but gets respected for it; Hawkeye can undermine the system at every step of the way but also flourish in it.
I can forgive this. I enjoy Hawkeye’s presence enough on top of the comedy. You gotta do what you gotta do. If you wanna see this all as a positive, it’s Hawkeye combining the skills needed for a System with his own humanity; the flaw in a System isn’t a System but in the lack of humanity.
That last line matters a lot here, I think. MASH strikes me as a show where the ideals are more pragmatic (and, even when things are serious or sad, inherently comedic) than utopian: it’s less interested in escaping the System or even inventing a new one and more interested in figuring out the cheats, exceptions, and minimal requirements for making the System more livable and compassionate (and getting it to pay out on occasion). Which I feel like goes along with it being partly about living in a community–it would actually make decent, if weird, paired viewing with Deadwood.
Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Season 1, Episode 1. “Macondo”. First time.
Yes, they’re doing this, despite its reputation as unfilmable. On Netflix, no less. And so far they’re doing it well, with sumptuous photography and production design and careful deployment of García Márquez’s immortal words.
By way of an example: it’s obvious to anyone that this would begin with the famous first line (“Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento…”) but it doesn’t get there right away. Rather, the camera first travels through what I recognize as the tragic, gorgeously displayed, end of the story before circling back to the beginning. Which is not the beginning proper either, needing a different flashback which is where most of the episode stays, covering the marriage of cousins José Arcadio and Úrsula, a murder and a haunting, their exile, the birth of their sons and the foundation of Macondo.
The filmmaking is up to the task, and they have a good sense of when to let the action carry a scene and when to let Gabo’s words go. The risk here of course is that this can become just an illustrated synthesis of the book instead of its own thing but this first episode largely avoids it and conjures up many great images, like the ghost haunting the Buendías in every moment of their lives, a long camera pan following a naked child through Macondo, the journey through the mountains, Melquíades and his travelling gypsies, Aureliano’s premonitions and inventions, and the first dream of the sea.
That said, I’m not entirely opposed to the illustrated novel approach, since it’s been nearly 20 years since I read the novel and, if nothing else, could use a refresher.
Less successful is the legendary sighting of the galleon in the jungle, which is too small and brief to match its place in the collective Latin American imagination (and I think has been slightly moved from when it happens in the novel to serve as the end of the episode here). It’s not a fatal mistake but it is one occasion where they erred on the side of the realistic instead of the magical.
That was striking and awe-inspiring. It’s interesting, when watching it, how much my feelings about it are guided by the music–a different score could push it all in a more inspirational direction (which would be fine, but which isn’t what I feel watching this). This comes across as more breathtaking and a bit more alien, emphasizing the timeless perspective on moments (and people) that are very fleeting. Really lovely, and almost science-fictional.
I encourage checking out that Bandcamp link, it’s surprisingly good music to work to for being so ethereal.