The Ex Live at Cafe Oto. Seán Zissou. 2015. ⚅

Oh, right; this isn’t a straight-up live recording: It’s edited down from three nights at Cafe Oto into 90 minutes, so we get a bewildering super-studded cast of performers, like Mats Gustavsson and Ken Vandermark and John Butcher etc etc. This blog has more details.

Anyway, the audio quality is absolutely fantastic, and the performances are amazeballs. They have so many people up on the er stage of Cafe Oto that there’s room for approx three audience members (I’m counting), mostly squashed together in the bar area.

I’m just exaggerating the normal amount!

Anyway… it’s sure nice to be back at Oto… even if only via DVD.

I’m pumping the volume up and using ear plugs to emulate the experience, though.

Drugstore Cowboy. Gus Van Sant. 1989. ⚃

[two minutes pass]

Oh! This isn’t the movie I was thinking of… I was thinking of… er….

Ah, yes, My Own Private Idaho.

I may possibly never have seen this one before. It’s Van Sant’s breakthrough movie, I guess?

And… Zell Sworddancer wasn’t a think in 1971, but it’s a fun thing to put in there.

Anyway, this is a Japanese 2K transfer of the movie. (There’s only Japanese subtitles.) But whatevs.

[fifty minutes pass]

This is probably patient one in the 80s “drug chic” epidemic, right? I mean, I totally want to do er dilaudid now.

Of course I like this movie; you can’t not like it. But I’m somewhat bewildered by the performances. The guy sidekick is doing the slack-jawed stoner thing… but not very well, and Dillon is being all 4D chess, and Heather Graham is super-glamorous, and Kelly Lynch is so over-the-top insecure… For me, there are a lot of awkward moments that don’t quite gel.

But it’s so much fun to watch. You know there’s tragedy coming, because how could there not be, but being with these people is exhilarating.

[the end]

Yeah, I’m disappointed. I’m a huge Van Sant fan, but this movie just seems so… under cooked. There should be more? I mean, I appreciate the Burroughs thing, but it’s just so slight in the wrong way.

Still, it’s a pretty entertaining thing to watch.

Hôtel Monterey. Chantal Akerman. 1973. ⚄

Oh! This is actually a silent movie. I was futzing around with the equipment to find out where the sound had gone.

Oops.

[half an hour passes]

Well, I’m kinda enjoying this? It is, for the most part, just static shots of hotel corridors where nothing is happening. We see some people in hotel rooms, but they are equally static… So when this happens, it’s almost shocking:

The shots themselves are fabulous: She’s got such an amazing eye for beauty in the mundane. (That said, she’s chosen a beautiful building to document: All the walls have high-gloss painting, and there’s very little decoration, and the architecture is so perfect. A totally undestroyed (probably due to having no money) original building.) But I’m sitting here wondering whether perhaps this would be better as a book of photography than a movie? And that’s, perhaps, not a good thing.

Even adding some ambient noise would have helped a lot, I think? I understand why she wouldn’t want to actually record at the hotel, because that’d make everything much, much more expensive, but you can add ambient noise in post (as she did in News From Home to great success).

[the end]

I do like this, and I think it’s successful at what it tries to do (probably). I was fascinated, and I want to visit that hotel that doesn’t exist any more. (Oh, it’s a Days Inn now….)