Future daze

Oh Rino! Can you be serious in your praise of Under The Sand? What a snooze that film was, a Francophilic piece of feigned attitude, clumsy theme-introduction ("oh look, she's teaching The Waves"), and the misuse of a beautiful woman. But then Ozon is a specialist when it comes to wasting beauty. I find his films empty, straining - exercises for a man in a long line for a soul. So desperate is he to maintain that "sublime" tone of the film that he never breaks the film's silence with any background for Rampling. Like so many films now, characters merely stare into space, so hard is it in this uncertain world to create film character. Wong Kar-Wai is half to blame for this, but his imitators, the ones who fill festivals with films patrons insist on finding "difficult but fascinating", are the real enemy here. And Sofia mimicking the master attitudinal moves - you know, lots of staring out of windows and ineffable tracking shots of characters walking around empty spaces while looking dazed. Did somebody say Antonioni? It isn't "pure form", or anything as noble. It's empty, and relentlessly "pretty". I find it increasingly devoid of interest. Look, to be completely unfair, and to also use a shitty metaphor - Griffith, Von Sternberg, Hawks, Godard et al. (you know my Gods) saw cinema at various times as a thing to fill - first a bucket, and in their finest moments a pool. Volume-holding devices. Directors like Ozon (esp. in films like Under the Sand) see all cinema as a wading pool, ankle deep. Very pretty ripples yes, very pretty light-on-water effects yes. But compare to Hawks' insistence on action-as-character, Godard's devouring ethnography, his one-more-question-please manner (obsession is the only way those films got made). When you do, it seems to me the films are artistically and spiritually bankrupt. And I think, ultimately, it's because they have no faith in a character of depth - or only if that depth of character is so great that they can't even start to explain themselves in mere words.

As far as I'm concerned, the history of cinema...

No, ditch the "cinema". The history of good movies is the history of action, occurence, incident.

And of course there are at least ten good examples to contradict my grand statement.
 

au contraire, funbags. I think it actually steers quite clear of the French cliché you allude to, that snot/snooty style of films with deliberate stares and deliberate emptiness, that pathetic reach at the heavy statement of existence. Are you on a Nick Ray binge or something? Or let's talk about Japanese cinema, Ads. Enough action for you there? Would maybe a nice Linklater film make you feel better? The IFC are running a said director season. Why, I ask. Go get yer westerns and some guns and make me a film. And I'll make you one with nothing in it, and still make you weep with poetry.
 

Speaking of Ray, found this funny credit on IMDB:

Wim Wenders .... Figure Wrapped in Plaster Bandages in Ambulance
 

I meant, of course, a Ray/Fuller binge.